How do you fight back against #consumerism and the #plannedobsolescence economy? How do you own and care for your products? Do you make your own products? Do you #repair, #reuse, or buy used before you buy new?
“Corporations, and their multi-million dollar marketing departments, have long-since figured out how to exploit the “consumer’s” anxieties in order to get us to buy more stuff. And while they reap in their billions of profits and millions in bonuses, the rest of us lose.
We lose because the majority of us are in debt and can’t afford anything but the cheapest and least durable products available. We lose because our particle board furniture and our disposable “smart” phones are literally designed to fail, along with our cars, our clothes, our electronics, and just about everything else. We lose because this never-ending stream of disposable products forces us to keep buying more stuff, emptying our pockets in order to support the most ethically corrupt corporations in the world.
We lose because these products are sourced from finite resources and extracted from the earth through heavily destructive, chemically-intensive processes that scar the land, pollute the rivers, and pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
We lose because the immense amount of waste that our “take, make, and dispose” society creates, forces us to landfill or incinerate – leaving a toxic burden on the poorest communities of every region. We lose because they poison our free sources of drinking water in order to sell us their “clean” water in disposable bottles.
This post is not intended in any way to attack the consumer, but to open the conversation to how we can re-envision an economy that doesn’t employ planned obsolescence as it’s mode of success. WE ARE ALL VICTIMS OF THIS, and we are all guilty of having made bad consumer choices at one point or another in our lifetimes.
The first step is to STOP calling ourselves consumers. We are not consumers; we are owners! We want to own our products, not throw them away! Consumerism is a concept that the corporations have created in order to get you to buy more stuff!”
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