A World or a Showroom?
Somewhere in the recent years, I realised I am living inside a marketplace disguised as a world. Everywhere I turn, someone is selling a new way to be beautiful, to be productive, to be put-together, to be ‘aesthetic’. And I won’t lie; I too have fallen for it.
I have bought things because they looked like the life I wanted, not the life I actually had. A ceramic mug seemed to promise calm mornings. A journal thick enough to hold a hundred versions of me, even though I have written on some two pages. A candle that smelled like vanilla – comfort and healing; as if healing could be bought and lit for four hours.
And perhaps you too have. Perhaps all of us have. Because in this generation, we don’t buy things; we buy personalities, we buy aesthetics, we buy the illusion that our lives can be edited, and shipped in three to five business days. But here’s the part I have begun to resent: the tenderness of wanting beauty has now turned into a pressure to consume endlessly. And overconsumption is not just a social issue but a personal ache.
Sharp truth? Overconsumption has made me question myself in ways I never signed up for.
It makes us feel inadequate, like I need to keep upgrading myself just to stay relevant. Like I must earn my place in the world by matching the algorithm’s mood boards. It creates a kind of identity paralysis, where suddenly our personality feels replaceable because someone else has a prettier, trendier version of the same thing. It thins the wallet, and somehow thins our confidence with it because overspending is always followed by a quiet shame we don’t talk about enough. It suffocates our space; our room packed with objects that felt essential in the moment but now sit like witnesses to impulsive decisions I made on days I felt emotionally brittle. It overwhelms the mind, because clutter is never just physical but spills into thought, into self-worth, into rest making us tired in ways sleep can’t fix.
And the sharpest wound of all?
Overconsumption has taught us to believe that we are a “work in progress” that must be constantly accessorised, that we are unfinished and must buy something to fix something, even when nothing was truly broken.
I don’t like this narrative. I don’t like that brands profit off our insecurities while we lose the one thing money can’t buy – our sense of self. And I refuse to live like that anymore.
Perhaps the most rebellious thing we can do now is to remind ourself that we don’t need a new tumbler to feel like a different person, or a new notebook to begin again, or a new outfit to be worthy of standing in a room. Perhaps the rebellion is choosing oneself before choosing the cart.
But we must remember that aesthetic is not the enemy; the pressure is, consumption is not the villain; the excess is. The objects are not the problem; the emptiness they’re supposed to fill is. And I am learning, slowly, stubbornly, that I don’t want a life that looks perfect from the outside but the one that feels honest on the inside. A life that isn’t curated but lived. A life without cart but a life where I am just a human being who doesn’t need to be fixed or rearranged.
