Are We Deceived by “Needs”?

I guess it is not the first time we talked about over-consumption on this blog before, but now, I guess it is time for us to talk about this again, as when my friend and I were talking about our favorite brands and things we would love to buy for ourselves, we realized that we are being over consumed by overconsumption. We have realized that our brains are being fed by all the information that we are given everyday through social media and that we have not yet had time to process it, and it has been fed to us again, again, and again, which is probably the reason why we are obsessing over certain products—because we have not yet had the time to process the information that we have been given and already we are seeing them everywhere. This is where the statement of “2019 is the last normal year of our lives” asserts its validity. In 2019, there was not such thing as COVID, there was no such thing as a trend of products going so viral that it becomes the “need” of consumers worldwide. 

It becomes this state where we are the players in the game where we are being objectified as deceivers who are falling for trends that will lead to waves of overconsumption and more and more people purchasing without reflecting on their actual needs and wants, but simply purchasing because they see others do and others look chic with them. So they also would like to be chic, which is why they purchased what they have purchased. Sometimes, we might like the trend from the bottom of our hearts—like me and my friend falling for the trend of rhode, touchland, and Summer Fridays. However, once we are completely letting go of our actual needs, the world that we see controls us—and we start to lose control over our own lives, which I think is the core reason as of why we think that 2019 was the last “normal” year of our lives. But, once we think about what we actually care about, I guess the choice wouldn’t be too hard to make.