Dying of Consumption

how to save personal style and ourselves: aesthetics as an existential imperative

Recently, there was tiktok discourse on third places, or lack of third places, and citing that as a reason for our generational discontent. Many comments on the video that started the conversation said that phones are this generation’s third place. Cue the alarm bells!!! I don’t need to state the obvious that it’s concerning that people are self-reporting that this generation’s third place is our phones. There’s no shortage of issues that come along with this, some of which is the regurgitation of the same internet panic we’ve been hearing about for the last 35 years: those kids and their damn phones!!! But what I do want to hone in on here is that third places are inherently social, and your phone and the internet are at worst antisocial, and at best, parasocial. Parasocial relationships are not inherently bad or pathological as the colloquial use of the term implies. A parasocial relationship is just a one-sided relationship and we all have them. You have one with your favorite youtuber, your favorite reality TV star, your favorite author or fictional character. What defines a parasocial relationship is not its intensity but its structure. And it’s this structure that prevents parasocial relationships from providing the same sense of connectedness that a reciprocal relationship can. 

So we are more isolated than ever, blah, blah, blah. We know this. This was very much accelerated by covid but there’s evidence to show that we were trending toward this before covid. And this is bound to happen in a society where people’s time and labor are owned by someone else, the majority of people’s waking life is spent working, most people have no investment in their work beyond it keeping them alive, and most people’s jobs don’t even pay them enough for things like healthcare, an apartment, and nutritious food, let alone things like going out to eat, going to the local bar, taking a class, etc. Because not only did a lot of people say that their phone or tiktok is their third place, others said that third places do exist, they’re just too expensive. People lack the time, money, and mental and physical energy to focus on cultivating interests and communities under capitalism. Working is exhausting. Being alive under these conditions is really difficult. And yes, we know capitalism is bad, we know working sucks, we know all of these things. But I’m here to say once again that it’s bad!!! It makes sense that I scroll on my phone after work instead of reading a book because I’m tired. It makes sense that instead of taking the time, money, and effort to figure out why I’m sad, I buy a new pair of shoes and that makes me happy for a second. There’s no shortage of “bad habits” that we engage in to numb out. And when life feels hard all the time and when we are rendered very little agency in the trajectory of our own lives due to political and economic structures, consumption is a means of both tuning out of the difficulties of the world and exercising a bit of control over our lives. Consumption in the modern world is a coping mechanism. 

I see the rise of “aesthetic” and “-core” culture as yet another enfeebled attempt at trying to locate ourselves in an increasingly incoherent and fractured world. The fact that there’s a new trending aesthetic every couple of weeks or months is a cope for a lack of community, a lack of time, a lack of energy, a lack of effort that we all suffer from. All of which are necessary for cultivating a genuine sense of personal style. Ah, yes…personal style. I finally said it! It’s what everyone, at least on my side of things, is talking about. Personal style is positioned as the antidote to the superficiality of microtrends. However, personal style is vulnerable to the same issues that the much derided aesthetics and -cores are, and unless we treat the source of the illness, we’ll still be sick. And by sick I mean superficially we’ll be subjected to a never ending cycle of braindead headlines about tomato girls and brown cinnamon cookie butter hair (can you tell I’ve spent way too much time on tiktok the last few years?) and existentially we’ll keep buying stuff in hopes of understanding who we are. 

So we know that our society lacks personal style in virtually every category- home design, clothing, faces, bodies, books, movies, tv shows (here and here), opinions, interests, desires. And I’ve spent a lot of this essay explaining why this is the case. We know that our cultural rot is the result of structural forces whose main goal is to create serialized worker-consumers who don’t have the time, the energy, or the means to do anything but work and consume. Coping makes sense. However, the inward turn that characterizes many of our modern habits of consumption prevents us from participating in overt forms of sociality like hanging out with our friends but it also prevents us from participating in covert forms of sociality like going to the grocery store  and walking down the street without headphones in. When our lives are increasingly mediated by screens or apps or entertainment that prevent us from encountering and engaging with the world, we lose opportunities to notice, feel, and desire, and it is this noticing, feeling, and desiring that create the affective conditions for personal style. 

For centuries, taste and personal style were impossible for many people, and the concept of personal style is a relatively recent invention in itself. For most of human history people have looked the same as their peers. So I actually don’t think the issue that the personal style discourse is getting at is necessarily that everyone looks the same. I think the clamor for personal style is symptomatic of a profound desire to cultivate genuine individuation through having a relationship with the world and with others people. You don’t necessarily want a closet full of clothes or an apartment full of stuff, you want a wardrobe and an apartment that reflects who you are and more than that, your connection with the world. You want a something-ness instead of the nothingness that characterizes trend hopping and overconsumption. Yes, trend hopping is annoying but the existential problem with trend hopping is the fact that trend hoppers don’t have a discernible sense of taste. Their aesthetic sensibility and point of view are not based in any sort of reality outside of the confines of their screens and the directives of algorithms. Blueberry milk nails are annoying because that is not a thing!! Chronically online takes are annoying for the same reason. They don’t come from anywhere in the world. And it’s this decontextualized relationship with the world that is existentially neutering all of us!!!

Consumption in late-stage capitalism functions as a means of  giving us the illusion of becoming someone else (mob wife, coquette, clean girl, quiet luxury) while simultaneously giving us the illusion that we are one purchase away from becoming more ourselves. It allows for dissociation and identification (awesome!). We are becoming increasingly similar precisely because of our lack of participation and interest in the world around us. However, because we’re incentivized at every turn to tune out and let algorithms decide who we are, we settle for cheapened signifiers of the types of people we want to be and the types of interests and hobbies we want to have. If we look at the history of subcultures it becomes very clear that enduring aesthetics (hippies, punks, preps) are born of an embodied experience of the world. Now, we buy into a trend as a means of feigning a worldview as opposed to actually doing the things it would take to have that worldview. However, genuine points of view, opinions, and styles are necessarily communal and embodied practices. It is through our relationship with the world that we get to know ourselves (cute).

 I’m clearly positioning personal style as more than the superficial issue of having a cute outfit but as an existential imperative for self understanding. We don’t know ourselves because the conditions of our world prevent us, or at least make it very difficult to engage with the world and take the time, effort, and skills to cultivate an embedded point of view as opposed to adopting whatever point of view we’re being fed from the algorithm. In typical neoliberal fashion, we take the problem of taste, personal style, and self-knowledge as an individual project that can be solved through the market. If you buy these clothes, you too can have personal style. If you read these books, you too can have a cultivated point of view. If you buy these things, you can have what feels like a life. And isn’t “a life” what feels like is missing nowadays? As wages go down and costs of living go up? As we have to work more for less pay? As we have less time and less money to do things for our survival (pay rent, pay for health insurance, take sick time) and do things that make us happy? (hang out with friends, go on vacation, buy a house, take time off). But this type of consumption is a short-lived and ultimately unsatisfying attempt at self-expression and self-actualization. We have to advocate for and work at building habits that contribute to a more enduring sense of agency. 

Our far-reaching cultural lack of style points to the deeper problem of an isolated world with disinterested people. I want to emphasize that this feeling of pessimism is warranted. We’re down bad as a society. Our world creates a type of immediacy that does not result in being more present but instead results in a culture that relies on instant gratification because the future seems impossible. Work and late-stage capitalism create a sort of nihilism where we can’t imagine the future so we circle the drain of the past. We live in a nostalgia-addled culture. This is the reason why it feels there’s a dearth of cultural novelty and every movie and TV show is a reboot, a sequel (or prequel), or an adaptation. We cling to nostalgia because, yes, indulging in things that brought us joy in childhood is magical and tender and things were simpler, but also because climate change, global politics, and late-stage capitalism (take a shot!) make the future seem impossible. This nostalgia can be as innocuous as a tiktok compilation of toys from the early 2000s but can be as nefarious as longing for a return to an America that was once great (yikes!). The slope is slippery. But I’m off the nostalgia soapbox. The point remains: why would we look toward the future when we don’t even know if there is a future to look toward? On an individual level, why do things for your future self when you don’t even know if there’s a future self to do things for? We buy things, experiences, services, and procedures that fill the void to make the present moment a bit more enjoyable and psychically coherent. 

It’s dark!! As I mentioned, the general malaise brought on by the state of the world is warranted. When I started working full time I also fell into these anti-social habits of consumption. The comfort and distraction of scrolling and shopping made my day more psychologically bearable but at the same time I was creating a serious existential void. I think a lot of us are familiar with the type of brain rot that characterizes endlessly scrolling, and I was suffering from it! My speech, the clothing I wore, the books I read, my opinions on things were all emblematic of someone who spent a lot of time online. As time went on I felt increasingly unable to think for myself or articulate my likes and dislikes beyond “the discourse” or the algorithm. This lack of self knowledge made me feel deeply insecure and incapable. How can we know ourselves if the majority of our lives are spent distracting ourselves and consuming as opposed to engaging? So pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get off your phone!! No, I know these things are very hard because being alive right now is hard. But the feeling of futility and the idea that consumption is the only thing that can make us feel better is partially manufactured by corporations to get you to buy things. Don’t let them win!!! Consumer culture is killing us. It’s killing us socially, culturally, spiritually, and physically. We’re drinking more than ever, we’re shopping at rates that are financially and environmentally unsustainable, our networks of social support are failing. So what do we do? I don’t really know. Another form of nihilism I used to suffer from is thinking that liberation can only be found in a systemic overhaul, which then led me to feel like my choices didn’t matter because revolution feels pretty impossible a lot of the time. It’s the same justification that people use when they consume things they know are unethical because there is “no ethical consumption under capitalism”. But I would argue that building habits of sociality in the small, fleeting, ephemeral, and imperceptible moments of our day is pretty important to any liberatory project. So if you want to call standing in line at the post office without earphones in resistance, go for it!