Our current consumption model is built on a paradox of emotional disconnection.
We're encouraged to form instant attachments to new products while at the same time being conditioned to view them as quickly replaceable.
Sometimes, I discuss at length with my friends how product releases like the annual iPhone and Samsung Galaxy models are scheduled to come out every year when the previous releases are still relatively new and functional.
From a business perspective, it seems like creating excess supply to meet a propped up demand that's artificially manufactured through sophisticated marketing and psychological manipulation.
My mind visits Edward Bernays' Propaganda book to make some sense of the rationale behind this calculated erosion of consumer attachment and value.
Edward Bernays, called the "father of public relations," wrote "Propaganda" in 1928. In my view, the book is basically an exoteric text that unveiled the systematic methods of manipulating public opinion.
But I think beyond that, he also esoterically understood human desires as malleable constructs that could be precisely engineered to the tee.
This allowed him to prop up entire lifestyles and ways of perceiving the world through transforming consumption into a form of social choreography.
In the realm of modern consumer culture, his theories are widely used and have evolved into a sophisticated machinery of desire in less than a century.
For one, companies have nearly perfected the skill of creating intricate psychological ecosystems that transform basic wants into perceived necessities.
For the most part, I think smartphones have been crafted into a status symbol, an extension of our personal identity and also a continuous narrative of technological belonging.
This is quite removed from its initial purpose as a communication device.
And you could argue that this transformation inherently alters our social interactions. Since, this device now mediates our social existence more than it facilitates authentic human exchange.
On the background, the psychological mechanisms driving this model are multilayered.
Usually, a product cycle in modern terms, is engineered to create a specific short fused emotional trajectory:
I think with intangible products like digital services or software, the emotional cycle is less linear and more fluid. Digital offerings exist in a continuous state of potential, always promising an upgrade, a new feature, a better version etc.
Now, a model like this serves multiple purposes from an economic perspective, it ensures continuous revenue streams for the company that employs it through maintaining a constant state of consumer anticipation i.e existing demand, more or less.
What worries me a bit is the latter, specifically the psychological costs.
A constant state of consumer anticipation is a form of sustained psychological tension of the wrong kind.
It's kind of like a delicate machinery that transforms desire into a perpetual state of incompleteness, where our sense of self becomes increasingly mediated by the promise of something else that will come in the future but it never actually arrives.
Extrapolate this into broader social systems, and you begin to understand why it's almost impossible to break cycles of manufactured identity and artificial progress.
I think it's not far fetched to say that we're now consuming narratives, lifestyles, and perceived potential versions of ourselves way more than we consume products/services.
And many of these narratives are very loosely rooted in any form of practical reality.
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