Once again an interesting article for Not Buying Anything, an observation that I hope is true, my only fear is that when this over and some people find they have more money than usual, they may go out on a spending binge. I hope not, I hope they keep their sanity and take stock of the things they enjoyed without spending money. Time for reflection.
This from Not Buying Anything:
Recreational shopping has been a pastime for decades. Similarly, leisure, or non-essential, travel has also been popular. That just changed. We will not be going back to the way it was before the year 2020.
Shopping and traveling were fun and entertaining for many in pre-pandemic times. When it was easy. We will not have the same zeal for spending when it is hard.
If shoppers have to wear masks, get their temperature checked at the door, sanitize their hands, and social distance once they get in to the business, consumption won't be what it was in the spend freely days of pre-pandemic times.
And if they continue to get infected, in-person shopping will remain a shadow of the peak consumerism days of the recent past, and likely will never come back in the same way.
Evidence for this is the largest increase in the American savings rate ever, that happened recently. When spending money becomes less attractive, savings rates increase.
What is good for your bank account, though, is bad for the overflowing vaults of the 1%ers.
This is the capitalist nightmare - people deciding to do other more enjoyable things instead of spending their meagre funds to buy goods and services they don't need. But that is what is happening.
All over the world humans are waking up every day and finding healthier, less expensive, and more meaningful, ways to occupy their time. Things that aren't shopping or traveling. Or traveling to go shopping.
This could be the end of many familiar things and arrangements. Will it be the end of consumerism, and would that take down capitalism, too? That would be welcome, because either we take it down, or it will take us down. That decision will be ours to make.
We have the power, that much is perfectly clear. If we won't work for them, and won't shop for their junk, what can they do? They need us more than we need them and their wasteful ways.
Our predatory psychopathic-lead system is getting morphed into who knows exactly what as the people rediscover their power to make change. Some of those changes are that we will become savers rather than spenders, and will choose the familiar home range over frivolous foreign sojourns.
After more than a decade of watching consumer behaviour closely, I am getting the feeling that many newly re-minted community participants are tiring of spending money on non-essential things, and going in debt to do so.
We are moving on to more important, more beautiful, more balanced concerns, and say to our former rulers and their soulless system, "Thank you for your service - we will take it from here".
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