Breaking the Consumer Cycle

Daily writing prompt

List your top 5 grocery store items.

View all responses

These writing prompts are always so ambiguous. It must be by design. Do they mean my favorite things to buy? I suppose that would be pancakes with real maple syrup, pizza, cake… Hmm, I thought this would be easier than it is.

I don’t know. But, what I do know is that I appreciate that we can shop for these things instead of having to make them ourselves. I’m thankful to society for providing me the means to sustain myself. Lord knows, if I had to fend for myself, it would never work. I have no instinct for the wild or for hunting. I’m not a D.I.Y. guy. Although, I would like to be. I envy people like that. I’m the type that if it’s broken, I’m most likely just going to buy a replacement.

I’ve heard that it used to be that back in the day if your vacuum failed, you would call a repairman. Things were also built to last, so it made more sense to repair them instead of replacing them. Either way, sometime between then and when I grew up, things changed. Consumerism took steroids, and things are made to be used a few times if that, and then tossed away. This encourages us to continue the cycle of buying and tossing. Consuming endlessly.

Then again, we didn’t have so many millionaires and billionaires. I often think about how we at the bottom have made those few at the top very wealthy. We’re caught up in this consumer cycle, but the money is in a funnel to the top. If you ask me, it doesn’t align. And it pisses me off.

I want to break the cycle. I feel stuck in it, though. When I look around for places to fulfill my needs, all I see are chains. Both in the metaphorical sense and the franchise sense. If there isn’t a Walmart available, you look for Dollar General. I was thinking about that store last week. They’re really good, with their name. “Dollar General,” like it’s a small general store from back in the day. Gives you the feeling of shopping somewhere local. The employees are local everywhere you go. So, you feel like you’re shopping with your neighbors. Sometimes you are. But that doesn’t mean the money is staying in your community.

No. The money is mostly going to the top, and a small, itty, bitty percent stays within your community. And to those corporations that say they’re giving back to the community, how does that percentage compare to the money that’s going to the executives? And then the news personalities can’t figure out why people are supporting this Luigi guy. I mean, if you’ve got half your senses about you, you can see the game is rigged. And I bet if you’re reading this, it’s not rigged in your favor… is it?

I bet it’s not.

I’m sure there are people out there who maybe haven’t made it this far, or by now are beginning to rethink reading this post. Sure, politics. We had it. We avoid it. We don’t want to talk about it, think about it, etc. Or, we have our own thoughts and we don’t want to discuss it any further. Right? Fine. But, I also bet that some, if not all of what I’ve said aligns with what you’ve been feeling this whole time.

It’s what we’ve all been feeling, and it’s frustrating.

I think there should be more equity built into the system. I think the system should lift everybody up, not just the very wealthy. And sure, some people say that we’ve all been lifted up, but why do some of us struggle so much when others won’t know the struggle for generations and generations because of generational wealth (or wouldn’t it be transgenerational wealth?)

Again, perhaps they should make these writing prompts less ambiguous.