Think to spend

Ray Rodriguez
Consuming Products is all in the head

Why do we spend to keep spending? What is consumption? The basic idea throughout the video “The Story of Stuff” by Annie Leonard and the passage from Allen D. Kanner’s and Mary E. Gomes’s “The All-Consuming Self” is that we think we want or need something therefore we go out and get it. This feeling of consumption comes from satisfaction in material items. In the video, Americans are considered to be one of the biggest consumers in the world. Why is this? Through times of crisis our political leaders tell us to shop in order to regulate money and help “stimulate the economy”. This eventually has become a habit in which Americans shop for fun. According to Kanner, “satisfying basic material needs” is the main reason why companies add advertisements and logos to attract more customers within their area (Kanner 81). The “three thousand ads a day” ingested by Americans shows how everything even we ourselves are walking logos (Kanner 81). Commercials are usually targeted to the young who lack charisma or just need a motive in life, and why not more than having to by things. Technology being “dormant, Sleeping Beauty” shows that even though certain consumer thoughts out there we have no control over it (Kanner 85). The videos uses of political and big business as a connected way of saying that the bigger businesses have a powerful affect on the government “The Story of Stuff” Annie Leonard. For example, Victor La-Boas use of spiritual and egotistical satisfactions shows how through commercial our everyday decisions are determined by what we see and what the government wants us to hear. The fact that the economy is rising because of spending, the richer get richer because of ideas, while the poorer get poorer because they want items they can’t have. The use of human alleviation through out the passage and the video shows how some products through advertisement are used by the public in order to feel better and get things off of their minds rather than just staying at home and think of everything negatively. This also plays into how simple items like the juice box in the video are so non-renewable that it posses a bigger threat to society. These items were either made to harm the environment or can’t be disposed after it looses its purpose also harming the environment. That is why so many products are releasing either carbon dioxide or dioxins into the atmosphere causing a very great harm. So next time you shop you will know that commercials got you to the store by advertising something compelling that you want to hear.