Consumption

Consumption

I just finished reading "Ultra Processed People" by Chris van Tulleken, and it prompted me to delve deeper into consumption in general. Over the past few years, I have worn the same t-shirt and jeans every day. I have managed to wear the same set for approximately four years now, only buying replacements for worn-out or torn garments. This made me feel very good about my consumption habits, but the deeper I looked, the more gaps I discovered. It seems that consumption itself is an addiction, not just what we consume. While fast fashion is a significant driver of consumption in general (people are buying 60 percent more clothes and wearing them for half as long) Link, we, as humans, tend to focus on the tangible because it's easier to quantify. Consequently, we inadvertently narrow our discourse on consumption. If we consider consumption as a function of time, tangibles like clothing for most people would be little more than a rounding error.

What

To illustrate what I consider in my definition of consumption, here is a non-exhaustive list of what I consume: Music, podcasts, news, movies, TV series, emails (Newsletters :p), delivery updates, what's new on Netflix, etc. Also, YouTube, YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, the number of likes on Instagram when I post (Thankfully no TikTok :p), takeout (doom scrolling on Uber Eats is a thing, or at least should be), Tweets, Reddit posts (my favorite being the /dadjokes subreddit), HBR articles, research papers, books, dating profiles, terms and conditions (sometimes I do read them), football matches, Airbnb housing details, flight timings, public transportation schedules, Amazon search results, ingredient lists on the back of food packaging, Diet Coke, chocolate cake, text messages.

I realized that sometimes I consume just to figure out what to consume—watching review videos before deciding what to buy. I don't know whether to laugh or cry, but thankfully there is an emoji for exactly this situation (:lolsob:).

Our media apps now have an in-video buy button! So we can transition effortlessly from intangible to tangible consumption and back! Innovation! So much of this is interspersed with adverts, and you can guess what they do (hint, fuel more consumption)! This is the case even after paying for premium plans. For example, the bus tickets on public transportation in some UK cities have McDonald's ads on them.

I find news and seemingly interesting articles (including those from HBR) to be a significant source of low quality consumption. It increases anxiety and gives a false sense of knowledge, as we either simply skim the surface of a topic or are fed a pre-made perspective. In both cases, we end up with incomplete knowledge, which in most cases can be more dangerous than no knowledge. My favorite example to cite here is 'Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs', which people use so frequently within the tech industry, but no one goes beyond reading the diagram. I have yet to meet a single individual who has read the original paper. It is a paper from 1943, and you can find it here [Link]. This phenomenon is most widely observed when people just read the headline and move on Link.

Now, everything we consume is not bad. Some podcasts are amazing, some tweets make us laugh, and we all love reading text messages from our friends! The issue lies in the fact that things that should account for a tiny percentage of our time are taking up way more time, leaving us with less time and, in some cases, less desire to consume the good stuff because, unlike the bad stuff, it doesn't provide an instant dopamine hit.

When & Where

Many of us are in a 24/7 consumption cycle. From wakeup alarms that play the news to sleep stories on Calm/Headspace. We consume while in the bathroom, during our commute, and we fill the 15-minute gap between meetings with a quick Twitter scroll or the equivalent #random channel on our company's chat platform. While we jog, on the plane, and to the extent that instead of facing a fellow human while eating, a significant proportion face a big screen.

We have made content shorter and shorter so that we can squeeze it into every nook and cranny of our day. Give us a moment of silence, and the phone comes out. I realized that I instinctively put in my earphones as soon as I leave the office, before I have even decided what I want to do—listen to music, a podcast, or read an article?

At this point it is a habit! Ask yourself what did you do while you waited for five mins for your friend who was running late? Did you not pull out your phone for a quick scroll?

Why

Attention and money: Companies make money by grabbing our attention, so it is in their best interest to have us consume more. Mostly to move us down the marketing funnel from Awareness--> Consideration --> Conversion. I can't even imagine people who might be falling asleep watching a YouTube video, only to have the ads between the videos absorbed into their subconscious. PS there is science behind this Link. I find myself marvelling at the abilities of companies to produce tangibles from intangibles, almost like magic. Like Harry Potter doesn't exist in any shape or manner in real life, but that hasn't stopped people from buying pieces of stick for $30 a piece (Guilty as charged!).

Innovation: There is a PM somewhere who believes that people want to buy stuff so badly that they are adding a buy button everywhere they can. Buy Now, Pay Later was invented to help us buy things we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't like (Original quote by Dave Ramsey), I feel comfortable saying this because pay-later support doesn't exist for essential things such as groceries. All the way to running countless experiments on the colour of the buy button. Not to take a dig at just the tech PMs, there are also people working on how to produce more designs for t-shirts so they can sell more!

Society pressure: 'You haven't seen The Office!' If I had a dollar for every time I had someone say that to me. It used to be just about tangible stuff, but the pressure has now expanded to cover media and places. As humans, we are genetically encoded to seek acceptance from groups as, for much of our history, being in large groups had evolutionary advantages such as not getting eaten by predators.

Economy: Consumption drives the economy, or at least the version we measure via GDP. Taking a stroll in the park or having a chat with your loved one or sleeping eight hours doesn't increase the GDP. Consumption is baked into the very fabric of our society. Our education trains us in ways to increase consumption. Remember the marketing funnel I touched on above? I had a chapter on that in my grad school! Nowhere in that chapter was a note of caution on how one should employ this knowledge or potential ethical considerations. There is research that suggests that more frequent salary cycles, such as in the US where getting paid bi-weekly is common compared to monthly cycles as in Europe, impact consumption Link.

Aversion to being uncomfortable: This is perhaps the primary reason driving consumption: our aversion to being alone with our thoughts. If one isn't used to this, our default thoughts are a bit scary, about things we missed out on, regrets, things we are procrastinating on, etc., which make us feel uncomfortable. Given we fill every waking moment with consumption, we have severely diminished our ability to be with our thoughts and nudge them in the direction we want. We have diminished our ability to dream, our ability to be creative because we want to consume rather than produce.

Impact

Loss of serendipity: Consumption is not inherently good or bad. Consuming new things can expand our minds, expose us to new experiences, enriching our lives in the process. But, serendipity is not really a critical component of how the products/services we use are designed. We are fed whatever keeps our eyeballs glued to the screen longer and nudges us to spend more. We get caught in our own worldview, aka echo chambers. Even when we are exposed to other perspectives, they are often presented in a manner that pushes us further down our own rabbit hole. Counter point: There is something beautiful about just browsing books in a bookstore rather than on Amazon!

No Depth: Developing expertise in anything requires sitting through a lot of boring and ugly parts. As the name suggests, these parts do not result in maximum engagement, so they are filtered out by the algos. I consume a lot of Neil deGrasse Tyson's short clips as I scroll through YouTube shorts, thus I know a bunch of random astronomy facts but how does that add any value? I don't know the first thing about space explorations. For comparison, a grad course is ~30 contact hours and the sitcom Big Bang Theory is ~120 hours long. Our current systems are amazing at creating an illusion of gaining knowledge/wisdom. On Wikipedia, you can find the list of top 50 YouTube channels; guess how many have anything to do with meaningful learning? Zero!

Fewer dreams and dreamer: Dreaming requires a break from consumption. Without this break, we are in reactive mode and skip the reflection stage. With more and more people spending more of their time in a consumption state, not only are we decreasing the time spent dreaming but also the number of people who are dreaming.

Human costs: This whole thesis was based on time as a measure of consumption, which is intangible. But there are real costs to our consumption in terms of its impact on the environment. A truckload of abandoned textiles is dumped in landfills or incinerated every second Link. People are exploited to maintain that pace, and the working conditions in many factories fall short of what we would consider humane, to the extent that we now have explicit standards like 'Fair trade' to label the ones that do have the minimum standard.

The Good!

Fortunately, it has never been easier to access previously state-of-the-art knowledge for free! One can learn and master almost any skill using the very same channels. I am currently learning Rust for free via a course designed by professors at Brown University. While I spend way too much time on Spotify, it was also where I discovered Lex Fridman and Andrew Huberman's podcast, which I highly recommend. Goodreads has been responsible for keeping me motivated to read more through updates from my friends and has helped me discover new books. Companies like Patagonia are pushing for responsible consumption and manufacturing practices and have demonstrated that it can be a viable business.

Balancing consumption

Getting the balance between quality and quantity is tough! Our devices and society are engineered to increase consumption, with some of the brightest minds to ever walk this planet spending forty hours a week figuring out how to keep the consumption engine humming.

• Limiting the number of sources: Replace rather than add is, in my experience, the most effective approach and can be applied to almost universally. It works on the simple principle that if you reduce the sources, then the quantity of content reduces as well.
• Understanding the incentives of the platform and/or producer: Understanding the incentives of the platform and/or producer: While it is not easy, it is possible to understand the incentives that drive people's actions. I found the following three questions help: What are they maximising for? How do they measure their own success? How do they deploy their success (usually money)? If you see your favourite creator talking about the growth of their follower count, that is a hint that they are maximising for growth, and you are potentially just a number to them. A lot of the sportswear companies are optimising for earnings per share, Patagonia perhaps is not. If you haven't read Yvon's letter about Patagonia's ownership titled 'Earth is now our only shareholder', I strongly encourage you to read that.
• Long form: Everything in life is nuanced, and in those nuances lies true beauty. Dinner at a Michelin restaurant is a great example of a long-form experience, even though each plate of food itself is small; by the end, you are full! I have found there to be a strong correlation between a restaurant's quality and how long they allow you to reserve a table for. That is why this email is ~2000 words long :D
• Not produced in the last ~24 hours: David Perell calls it the Never-Ending Now. Great things stand the test of time, so by simply waiting, we can filter out the good from the rest. It is, however, not easy, as a society, we have built-in mechanisms to generate FOMO very effectively.
• Avoid temptation instead of exerting willpower: Evolution has over the millions of years programmed us to repeat activities that give us a dopamine hit. Fighting this system is incredibly hard. It is far more effective to avoid temptation instead of deploying willpower. Add as much friction as possible to control undesired consumption behaviours. Simply delete apps after you use them. For example, I install Instagram for a few hours on the weekend and then delete it.