34: reasons people buy
i saw a tweet yesterday that said there are 5 reasons people buy anything:
sex, money, time, approval, and peace of mind.
but i think they can be consolidated further.
“sex sells” has never been about sex. it’s about status and mimetic desire. it’s about power and value. it’s about approval.
and money is useless on its own. it’s about what money confers, which is also status and acceptance. it’s also about what money costs, which is labor, which is… time.
okay, so now there are 3 things people want to buy: approval, time, and peace of mind.
well, why do people care about approval in the first place? maybe because they don’t value themselves, and the idea is that once Other People value me enough, maybe i’ll finally be ok, and then i'll have peace of mind.
and why do people care about time? well because time is limited and we want to accumulate more or to save it or to extend the time we have so we can enjoy life, we can feel like we aren’t wasting our precious temporality, why? so we can shed our existential anxiety, and in its absence... have peace of mind.
okay maybe it doesn’t always break down that simply. but the modern person is CONSTANTLY chasing feeling-states rather than objective outcomes. the “objective” outcomes are just starter pack fantasies we’ve co-constructed with Disney and Madison Avenue and http://Instagram.com to give us side quests and an illusory containment of our desire for the Infinite, our desire to feel alive.
peace of mind isn’t just rainbows and sunshine and dandelions. it’s a feeling of rightness, a disappearance of that fundamental sense of brokenness about Self/World. but i’m not convinced that feeling of brokenness ever fully goes away, no matter how much sex/money/time/approval/peace you have.
i think the people who become truly free, not just of consumerism and scarcity around money but free of Attachment and Desire (the generally unwilling and frustratingly graspy kind) are the ones who accept this incompleteness as an inextricable part of life itself. the brokenness is itself part of the cosmic dance/joke/video game thing.
if you knew you were going to die tomorrow, how would you spend your time/money/attention?
i've been asking myself this lately and the answer is a nonverbal sense of wonder and stupor at how i typically spend my life. but hey at least i sat down to write today