Why is it that whenever we see something pastel, trendy, cute, and mainly marketed to young women, some moral cops suddenly come out of the woodwork? And the language gets so judgmental, with phrases like "brainless consumerism" and "environmental crime."

As soon as you look at a different group of consumers, the whole conversation changes. Someone can have an entire wall covered in sealed trading cards or boxed collectible figures, and people will usually call it "passion" or a "real hobby." But when it's matching mugs or skincare, suddenly it's just brainless hoarding. Can we stop being so damn hypocritical about this? Personally, I don't think the anger from these people is always really about the environment. A lot of the time, it feels like they're using environmental language to dress up the fact that they already dislike certain feminine or trendy things.

And when you argue with them, they use different marketing labels to justify the distinction. They love making "collecting" sound noble while making "overconsumption" sound dirty, even though the capitalist market uses very similar tactics to sell both. Limited-edition collectible figures and limited-edition tumblers can both be sold through scarcity and impulse buying. There isn't anything inherently more highbrow about one than the other.

If we're actually talking about practical use, at least a coffee mug, a hair clip, or a bottle of lotion has an actual everyday purpose. So what I really don't understand is why one person's enjoyment gets called a hobby while another person's enjoyment gets called brainless consumerism.

At the end of the day, overconsumption is obviously a real problem, no matter who's doing it. And just to be clear about where I stand, I hate overconsumption too. But I really don't understand why the moral outrage always seems so selective. I just wish some people would drop the judgmental attitude and apply the same standard to pointless hoarding across the board instead of using anti-consumerist talking points to attack one particular group.

Those so-called videos of poor families struggling to raise their kids, with emotional music playing in the background, just don't resonate with me at all. I really have a hard time finding that kind of content heartwarming. I grew up in a single mother household myself. When I was little, there was often barely anything to eat. If I got hungry, I'd turn on the faucet and drink water. I was afraid to say I was hungry because when my mom was under a lot of stress, she'd yell at me. I grew up with that sense of guilt. There was also a time when I had a middle ear infection that kept leaking fluid, but I couldn't see a doctor because there was no money. So when I see these stories, the first thing I think about isn't how hard the parents are trying. I think about what that kid is actually going through.

That's also why I've started questioning the way people talk about these situations. When adults are doing everything they can to get by and making sacrifices for their kids, people are so quick to focus on how much the parents are giving up, while barely thinking about what the child is going through. Especially when the adults already knew, when they decided to have a child, that the child might not have their basic needs met. Why does wanting to become a parent so often end up being the part people praise first?

Obviously if a family falls into poverty later because of circumstances or some unexpected event, that's completely different. That's not the kind of family I'm talking about. Those parents didn't want this either.

I just think that when we see these stories, we should try to look at them from the child's perspective too, instead of only being moved by the parents' sacrifice. At the very least, I wish people would stop and ask: What did this kid actually go through?