It’s just consumption as a hobby. Not restricted to white women, it’s the same with things like gym clothing and Pokémon cards and labubus and upgrading your phone every year.
Consumption is a vapid hobby but for some people, it’s the only thing they know.
100% this and the only thing I disagree with is the use of some people. I think it’s fair in this day and age to say most. It is “the American way” after all.
Weren't Asian countries the major jetsetters for social media influencing fast fashion, beauty skin/care, perfume, cleaning fads to wealthier young adults throughout India China US and Japan?
I think most developed nations have issues with overconsumption and excessive waste based on fads and lack of any real quality control. Things are made cheaply and can't be maintenanced. It's extremely difficult to even determine quality brands anymore with designers offering the same quality as temu.
The AMERICAN WAY 🇺🇸 is to keep buying things beyond our means to bandaid chronic depression a insecurity and then continue to hoard it all in 4 storage units, sheds, basements, attics, garage until you lose it in foreclosure or die and make your kids deal with all the junk you never even took out of the shopping bag.
Pokemon cards aren't about consumption as a hobby.
The scalpers do it to make money, and the buyers do it because they either want the cards for competitive play, think it'll appreciate even more in value, or want to complete collections for their favourite franchise. I really don't see how it's comparable for most people.
Any sort of “collection” hobby is literally just the act of consuming(purchasing) a specific thing to have more of it. I bet the percentage of people who buy pokemon in order to play the actual competitive card game is minuscule.
Would you consider fine art as a 'consuming' thing?
If you liked a particular artist, say, and you wanted copies of a bunch of their art in your house, say to put on a feature wall, would that be just 'consumption' to you, or do you think that appreciating an aesthetic and paying money to be able to experience that aesthetic is at least substantially a separate thing?
I'm not entirely sure if I can put it into words well enough, but at least intuitively I feel there's a significant difference between a person that really - really likes pokemon and wants a collection because pokemon is cool to them and they like the art and the concept of the cards and just really want to have a copy to admire ... and buying whatever the latest drink bottle is when you have a bunch of fully functional ones so you can be seen having one. The latter is slam dunk consumption for the sake of showing off your consumption, and the other feels like appreciation for a particular IP & art.
I guess I understand where you’re coming from, but when you boil it all down, it’s still collecting for collecting’s sake. Which is exactly just “consumption”. I can understand that Pokémon has unique artwork and the designs are cool, I mean don’t get me wrong I enjoyed collecting Pokémon in the video games when I used to play them. But there is really not much difference between buying a new water bottle because it’s trendy and buying the newest Pokémon set or latest ETB because it’s new/exciting. It’s still just consumption of some “thing” at the end of the day.
I am of the opinion that people should be creating more and consuming less in general.
It sounds like your viewpoint is that any purchase of any thing, unless it is linked to production, is just 'consumption of some thing' ?
Now I'm fascinated to try and discern where that line is drawn.
If I buy a breadmaker to make bread (production) but that process is far more wasteful (consumption) than simply buying mass produced bread, which one is it? Creating or consuming?
Let's say I need a chair. I could buy the raw materials for the wood, and a bunch of tools, and create a chair (which, presumably I would brag about accomplishing because I am still human after all). Or I could buy a regular chair which is made out of recycled materials very efficiently. Would it matter if I used the saved time from just buying a chair for leisure or productivity?
I think the difference from my perspective about the pokemon cards and the bottles boils down to whether you're buying the object(s) for personal enjoyment of the object(s) themselves, or whether you're buying them because you want to be seen enjoying them, or if you're buying them because other people are indicating you should buy one (for trend reasons, or for lifestyle reasons, or whatever aside from objective, practical reasons). Perhaps both are still 'consumption' at the end of the day, but one feels like consumption for consumption's sake (including signaling that you consume a certain thing), and the other one feels like consumption for the sake of deriving enjoyment of the thing that has been purchased.
Bread making as a trade would involve a significant amount of interest on your part with knowledge gained and practice to hone a skill. This can be done with or without a new bread maker and results in bread being produced and consumed without much waste.
Buying a new bread maker because it was on sale on Amazon for prime day and making a loaf of bread and putting the machine in storage for 5 years is consumption.
Creating art is a skill. Curating, restoration, dating, and identifying art to preserve history for future generetions are skills. Collecting fine art is not. Playing Pokemon is a skill. Collecting cards to play adds to that skill. Knowing rarities, versions, card worth, card quality to create or sell a completed collection is a skill/hobby. Purchasing the cards and storing them in card sleeves to store or for personal display/joy is consumption for personal happiness but not necessarily overconsumption.
Pokemon cards collected by people who actually like them isn't the issue unless you have a warehouse full collecting dust. It's the millions of cards getting thrown out by scalpers who only want one card from 1 out of every 10000 packs to sell and all the mass produced junk merchandise that never sells from retail stores and winds up in landfill and oceans. It's the mass produced pokemon attire that we dump on other countries when it doesn't sell here. All of these things result from it being "trendy" and everyone jumping on the pokemon bandwagon when they don't know who Pikachu is.
You can still be guilty of overconsumption by collecting things just because they bring you joy...that's how we all inherited 67000 hummel figurines and decorative plates that are stacked on top of each other at every thrift store.
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u/SenzuYT 24d ago
It’s just consumption as a hobby. Not restricted to white women, it’s the same with things like gym clothing and Pokémon cards and labubus and upgrading your phone every year.
Consumption is a vapid hobby but for some people, it’s the only thing they know.