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Consumer freedom is a real kind of freedom that goes hand in hand with the freedom to choose more meaningful lifestyle and career choices. The reason those choi

Consumer freedom is a real kind of freedom that goes hand in hand with the freedom to choose more meaningful lifestyle and career choices. The reason those choices are meaningful is precisely because the stakes are higher than what you buy at the store. If you go back two hundred years, the ability for a family to offer their children such an abundance of food with so many options was extremely meaningful because poor people really did have to struggle to put food on the table and almost nobody had access to so many different kinds of food. Now we take it for granted because it’s easy and anybody can do it, not because we stopped enjoying it. When people decry that nobody else will pay them to be an artist or to follow their passions they’re really decrying that they’re unwilling or unable to follow their passions without either giving up something or without offering enough back to other people to justify their use of their resources. Reality doesn’t give a shit whether or not you’re free, neither does the guy that built your house or grew your food, or the nurse that wipes your ass when you get sick. You either have to be the change you want to see or stop whining that other people won’t adjust their lives to conform to the way you want them to be, without subjecting yourself to any discomfort beyond jeering from the sidelines. It’s really easy to imagine a world in which you’re free to benefit from everybody else’s lack thereof, children do it all the time.

h2zizzle 1y ago
Productivity has outpaced population growth for some time, and the largest obstacle to the full-fledged social stability that would guarantee ubiquitous "food on the table" (at least, in the West) are people like you, who advocate zealously for artificial scarcity based on a mistaken or emotional sentiment. Anyway, "consumer freedom" as we know it is a facade, with a handful of conglomerates owning most of the brands you know, a few large investment funds owning the conglomerates, and a few factories in Asia supplying many of the parts and products that nominally Western brands sell. The choices aren't meaningful and the costs are higher because we try to maintain this appearance of choice (hence, Temu).
- weitendorf 1y ago
  How willing are you to farm for your own food, or let someone else decide what's worth eating? How willing are you to order other people what to do without taking those orders yourself? Do you think that you're going to be the one in charge in a world where someone gets to decide we have enough different kinds of cereal? There are places where you can live like that right now, most people don't like them. And if you think I'm whatever cultural archetype you hate that keeps things this way, just know that my life sucks too and I'm giving up a lot to just try to make it better for other people instead of moseying along hating what I do and how powerless I am. But pretty quickly you realize people hate that even more than they hate their own suffering, nothing you do will ever be good enough for them because they just want to be miserable and make it someone else's fault - if they take any responsibility for it, they have to admit that it's not going to just change for them. Nothing is actually stopping you from making your own music, nobody has to listen to it though, unless you make them. But it's your only choice if you don't like the music you have already. Just get ready for people to tell you they don't like it.
  - h2zizzle 1y ago
    Of course there are places like that now; if you're an American, you're living in one. "Consumer choice" didn't save us, because everyone made the same choices and all of the corporations behind those choices merged and repackaged their all-too-similar products with slightly different branding. But, as you say, that's not because people don't want choice. It's because the choice was often between "safe and decent and expensive" and "unhealthy or dangerous but cheap" and sometimes even "unhealthy or dangerous and also expensive." The choice wasn't meaningful. I live in an apartment, but I've got a few food plants on my deck. People do what they can within a broken system driven by the profit motive (read: exploitation), but it IS a system and it IS broken, and that's something that no amount of advocating for "consumer choice" or "working hard" within the broken system will change. And you bet your ass that I'd love to see what we have get replaced with one with fewer "choices", where the remainder are actually good ones. Maybe stop complaining yourself and make that happen. As for me, I'm getting ready to harvest my sweet potatoes and draw a few storyboards. Hopefully one day the world will catch up to the fact that I don't actually have to do the former because we produce more than enough industrially, and that people who can do the latter are a badge of honor for our objective prosperity, and not a burden.
anubistheta 1y ago
Exactly. The essay meandered, and didn't say much of note. It has vague illusions to personal choice and markets being detrimental. But that's it. Too many people feel entitled the control the choices of others. And yet they rarely accept equal control of their choices. > "But an emphasis on choice as a form of liberation has occasioned serious resentments in different sectors and geographies, where it can seem a direct threat to other, more communal values and needs." I think this quote sums it up nicely. Personal liberation is not a threat to mutually beneficial communal values. If you need to force people to behave as part of your community, then it should be voluntary. One should be able to choose to pursue any form of freedom or community they'd like. If you want freedom to be "an act of pure imagination" and live a communal lifestyle, you should have the choice.
- weitendorf 1y ago
  Right, it performs exactly what perpetuates the problem the author has with the world, in failing to provide or enact any positive vision for how to make things better, and in projecting their own desires onto others as if they're an objective measure of how things ought to be. When I was a kid, I loved walking down the fucking cereal aisle. I personally don't understand why people are so into concerts and music festivals but my girlfriend loves them, and I don't see why they're any worse than the number of open source web libraries or discord channels that people in my demographic take joy in. The one thing that truly made a difference for my own personal satisfaction was in realizing that inaction and despairing about society because of my own problems were a defense mechanism to justify what might happen if I tried to actually make things better, and either failed or became something I moralized against. Who gives a shit that there's too much cereal? What's actually making people unhappy is not enough of something else, or something missing in their lives that they can't find. Ultimately you either choose to do nothing or to try to make things better, and accept that inaction is itself a choice.
zyklonix 1y ago
That’s a fair point, material abundance and consumer freedom have lifted billions out of hardship. What I found eye-opening in the essay, though, is that abundance can coexist with emptiness: when every decision is individual and transactional, we lose the shared meaning that once came from depending on one another. The argument isn’t against comfort or choice, but against mistaking options for connection.
- weitendorf 1y ago
  I interpret it differently - the author is arguing that in becoming increasingly free of the hardship and consequences brought by lack of choice, we became increasingly disconnected from others because we didn't have to rely on them. But that doesn't have anything to do with milk, or mean we're not free. People actively exercise their freedom every time they choose personal convenience and optionality over other people. It's not the lack of freedom, but an outcome of it that the author finds undesirable - same with their argument that the amount of choice is so overwhelming that it begets freedom. I've been to the grocery store enough to just get what I like and get it out - you either have to willfully participate in it to let something that unimportant overwhelm you, or think your inability to not get overwhelmed is universal or important enough to not realize that some people want those options more than you, or just are unbothered by it. If you allow yourself to participate in something meaningful then you just won't care about having so many unimportant decision to make, because you'll choose to not think about them, even if it means you have to accept that there might be even worse outcomes than picking the wrong carton of milk. Personally, I believe that it's what might actually help the author get over whatever it is that causes them to point the finger at having too many options - find something where your decisions matter.

h2zizzle 1y ago

Productivity has outpaced population growth for some time, and the largest obstacle to the full-fledged social stability that would guarantee ubiquitous "food on the table" (at least, in the West) are people like you, who advocate zealously for artificial scarcity based on a mistaken or emotional sentiment. Anyway, "consumer freedom" as we know it is a facade, with a handful of conglomerates owning most of the brands you know, a few large investment funds owning the conglomerates, and a few factories in Asia supplying many of the parts and products that nominally Western brands sell. The choices aren't meaningful and the costs are higher because we try to maintain this appearance of choice (hence, Temu).

weitendorf 1y ago
How willing are you to farm for your own food, or let someone else decide what's worth eating? How willing are you to order other people what to do without taking those orders yourself? Do you think that you're going to be the one in charge in a world where someone gets to decide we have enough different kinds of cereal? There are places where you can live like that right now, most people don't like them. And if you think I'm whatever cultural archetype you hate that keeps things this way, just know that my life sucks too and I'm giving up a lot to just try to make it better for other people instead of moseying along hating what I do and how powerless I am. But pretty quickly you realize people hate that even more than they hate their own suffering, nothing you do will ever be good enough for them because they just want to be miserable and make it someone else's fault - if they take any responsibility for it, they have to admit that it's not going to just change for them. Nothing is actually stopping you from making your own music, nobody has to listen to it though, unless you make them. But it's your only choice if you don't like the music you have already. Just get ready for people to tell you they don't like it.
- h2zizzle 1y ago
  Of course there are places like that now; if you're an American, you're living in one. "Consumer choice" didn't save us, because everyone made the same choices and all of the corporations behind those choices merged and repackaged their all-too-similar products with slightly different branding. But, as you say, that's not because people don't want choice. It's because the choice was often between "safe and decent and expensive" and "unhealthy or dangerous but cheap" and sometimes even "unhealthy or dangerous and also expensive." The choice wasn't meaningful. I live in an apartment, but I've got a few food plants on my deck. People do what they can within a broken system driven by the profit motive (read: exploitation), but it IS a system and it IS broken, and that's something that no amount of advocating for "consumer choice" or "working hard" within the broken system will change. And you bet your ass that I'd love to see what we have get replaced with one with fewer "choices", where the remainder are actually good ones. Maybe stop complaining yourself and make that happen. As for me, I'm getting ready to harvest my sweet potatoes and draw a few storyboards. Hopefully one day the world will catch up to the fact that I don't actually have to do the former because we produce more than enough industrially, and that people who can do the latter are a badge of honor for our objective prosperity, and not a burden.

anubistheta 1y ago

Exactly. The essay meandered, and didn't say much of note. It has vague illusions to personal choice and markets being detrimental. But that's it. Too many people feel entitled the control the choices of others. And yet they rarely accept equal control of their choices. > "But an emphasis on choice as a form of liberation has occasioned serious resentments in different sectors and geographies, where it can seem a direct threat to other, more communal values and needs." I think this quote sums it up nicely. Personal liberation is not a threat to mutually beneficial communal values. If you need to force people to behave as part of your community, then it should be voluntary. One should be able to choose to pursue any form of freedom or community they'd like. If you want freedom to be "an act of pure imagination" and live a communal lifestyle, you should have the choice.

weitendorf 1y ago
Right, it performs exactly what perpetuates the problem the author has with the world, in failing to provide or enact any positive vision for how to make things better, and in projecting their own desires onto others as if they're an objective measure of how things ought to be. When I was a kid, I loved walking down the fucking cereal aisle. I personally don't understand why people are so into concerts and music festivals but my girlfriend loves them, and I don't see why they're any worse than the number of open source web libraries or discord channels that people in my demographic take joy in. The one thing that truly made a difference for my own personal satisfaction was in realizing that inaction and despairing about society because of my own problems were a defense mechanism to justify what might happen if I tried to actually make things better, and either failed or became something I moralized against. Who gives a shit that there's too much cereal? What's actually making people unhappy is not enough of something else, or something missing in their lives that they can't find. Ultimately you either choose to do nothing or to try to make things better, and accept that inaction is itself a choice.

zyklonix 1y ago

That’s a fair point, material abundance and consumer freedom have lifted billions out of hardship. What I found eye-opening in the essay, though, is that abundance can coexist with emptiness: when every decision is individual and transactional, we lose the shared meaning that once came from depending on one another. The argument isn’t against comfort or choice, but against mistaking options for connection.

weitendorf 1y ago
I interpret it differently - the author is arguing that in becoming increasingly free of the hardship and consequences brought by lack of choice, we became increasingly disconnected from others because we didn't have to rely on them. But that doesn't have anything to do with milk, or mean we're not free. People actively exercise their freedom every time they choose personal convenience and optionality over other people. It's not the lack of freedom, but an outcome of it that the author finds undesirable - same with their argument that the amount of choice is so overwhelming that it begets freedom. I've been to the grocery store enough to just get what I like and get it out - you either have to willfully participate in it to let something that unimportant overwhelm you, or think your inability to not get overwhelmed is universal or important enough to not realize that some people want those options more than you, or just are unbothered by it. If you allow yourself to participate in something meaningful then you just won't care about having so many unimportant decision to make, because you'll choose to not think about them, even if it means you have to accept that there might be even worse outcomes than picking the wrong carton of milk. Personally, I believe that it's what might actually help the author get over whatever it is that causes them to point the finger at having too many options - find something where your decisions matter.