Consumerism

My phone is taking a shit. Or so it would seem. It claims to be making a call but I can’t hear any ringing in the earpiece. This happens on speakerphone as well. There are other issues related to calling but I’m not going to go into them here because it’s late and I’m, as the French say, lazy.

I suppose it may be time to get a new phone as I’ve had this one for a little over 5 years. And it was an older model when I bought it. But I’ll be damned if I’m happy about it. And it’s not just because I’m cheap. That’s certainly part of it. But a much larger part of it is that I have recently been getting more and more sickened by consumer culture and its effects on the environment and our psyches. It disgusts me to see people getting a new phone every one to two years because a new model has a slightly “upgraded” feature that literally no one asked for.

The effect of this rampant consumerism on the environment is beyond sickening. The extraction of rare earth materials to continue pushing this garbage onto us is so detrimental not only to the regions where the mining is happening, but also on the global level. Again, I’m far too lazy right now to do research on the effects, but I have been doing some reading on the subject and it just makes me want to use what I have to its fullest extent. I like to think of that as my farmer mentality. Reuse until it can’t be reused anymore. Only buy something new when you absolutely must.

I have tried a number of different troubleshooting methods to fix my phone, up to and including a full factory reset. Nothing has worked. I’m going to try to take it to one of those phone repair places to see if there is a solution they know of that I haven’t tried. My hopes are low that anything will work. If I have to get a new phone, I’m determined to not spend an arm and a leg on the newest of the new with all the bells and whistles I frankly don’t have the time, energy, or desire to learn about and use.

The obsolescence being designed into all of our technology products is a huge problem. Of course, like in all things, progress is defined as more, more, more. Bigger, better! Use all of the resources until there are no more! I’m doing my best to not be a part of that culture. But, goddammit, it’s hard in this day and age to avoid it completely. Each time I fail at it, I feel sick to my stomach. Overwhelmed. Like I’ve failed somehow.

I’m not here passing judgment on anyone who celebrates this type of culture, but I am not one of those people. I intend to flesh out some of the ideas I touched on here in a future post because I have many opinions about many things that touch this subject. Income inequality, wastefulness, willful ignorance, consumerism, capitalism. But tonight, I just needed to word vomit all over the place. Thanks for reading.