Consumerism

Just Tell Me How Much

Garth Beyer

1378473_724120424268464_264967151_nSeeing this was bittersweet. Bravo for the beverage companies that have such an established brand that all they have to compete with is price. But what an unfair advantage over beverage companies looking to introduce new tastes, for the beverage companies having fun with their products, and for those beverage companies looking to build themselves up by donating a majority of their profits to a charity.

This is when not only beverage businesses, but we, as their consumers, need to understand what the definition of success in business is.

Do we want to buy into what is cheapest? Isn’t a cheap price a sign of a cheap product? Does the cheapness mean they care about the consumer less? By setting a low price, are they closing the market to what consumers might prefer?

We have to think wisely of what we consume because what we buy isn’t just a product, we buy into the idea, motivation, and feeling the business puts behind it.

I say this is also a bitter concept because when all we care about is price, we lose track of the real human interests that many other beverage companies sell.

 

Stay Positive & There’s Always More To What You Buy

Garth E. Beyer

The Faults Of Overtime

Garth Beyer

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The fault is all on you.

Quite recently in my career as a journalist, I decided that I would not do an interview that goes over an hour. Collectively, the interview may take more than an hour, but the total would not be one continuous effort to get all that I could out of it. I also hold this rule for team meetings or anything one does in groups.

When the hour is up. It’s up. Not a minute over. Sometimes – and preferably – it ends a few minutes short of an hour.

People are exhausting. So is caring, listening, and interacting with other people. I’ve come to the conclusion that speaking for an extra three minutes or asking people to stay late or staying on one topic when it was scheduled to change 10 minutes ago does more harm than good. Why does this matter?

Think about your work. What do you do? There are very (very!) few jobs that don’t require you to interact with another person or group of people. (For those few jobs that don’t, I guarantee they would only benefit by having human to human interaction.) The thought behind this is that while an extra two minutes may mean nothing to you, those you interact with may view their time as more valuable. (Not to mention, your inability to recognize this leaves those who you interact with with the impression that you don’t care about them, which is exactly what you set out not to do.)

To stay parallel with my recent writing on consumerism and positive emotionalism (that people buy products that make them feel certain ways and sacrifice leisure time to do so), overtime needs mentioning.

The concept behind normal working hours and being paid a larger amount if you worked over those hours (overtime) was introduced in 1937 by the Fair Labor Standards Act. The development overtime has taken in the workplace is outstanding, both in terms of higher pay for working overtime and pushing employers to heavily restrict the ability for workers to work overtime. In turn, offering workers more leisure time.

I argue that with this additional leisure time, people still participate in overtime. With “overtime” being defined as our pursuit of that which makes us feel the way we want to feel through working more than is reasonable and beyond meaningful. (Work, by my definition, is anything that we put effort into doing without passion.) One does not need to have a full-time cubicle job with benefits for one to be considered working. Many times, just doing dishes and vacuuming is work.

The pivotal point here is that overtime is an average object covered with a cloak of hope. Hope that if one works hard enough, that what is under the cloak will turn into something that makes them feel better; be it a bigger car, a better type of coffee brew, or just new dishes.

What puzzles me most is that we work overtime to perform this cloak-covered magic when we are better off performing the real magic of working with passion (making art).

The wand is in your hand.

 

Stay Positive & You Don’t Need An Object Just To Wave It

Garth E. Beyer

Ironically, Seth Godin touched on part of this post this morning. Full disclosure, I had the idea and began writing about this prior to my viewing of his blog.

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Wait, That Was Leisure Time?

Garth Beyer

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Recently I’ve written a lot about materialism and how uninformed we are of our own real desires and intentions.

We the people do not want more things. What we want is to feel. We don’t buy energy drinks because they are full of sugar, taste good, or because other people buy them. We buy energy drinks because they make us feel energized. They make us feel productive. You and I both know how great of a feeling that is.

This is positive emotionalism at its finest.

And positive emotionalism (seeking out and leveraging what makes us feel good) is expensive. Our desires are manipulated by marketing, but what’s more important is that we do seek out items that make us feel one way or another, regardless of being marketed to. In more simple terms, if we were never marketed to, we would still find energy drinks that make us feel productive because the feeling is what we really want.

How does this affect you and me?

Research has shown that we don’t necessarily work more each week. If anything, we work less and have more leisure time. On the other hand, I would argue that during the hours we do work, that we work harder. Furthermore, the hours that we don’t clock in, we find ourselves still working. For what?

We’ve exchanged leisure time with our pursuit of how we want to feel. The defining principle here is that our pursuit has lead us to consume rather than enjoy, to buy instead of play, and to fall into instantly crippling debt when we could be doing something remarkable with our leisure time.

Marketers don’t control us. Materialism doesn’t control us.

But our ignorance of “how” we can feel the way we want to feel – that’ll be the death of us. After all, it already is the cause of our “non-existent” leisure time.

We have to search for less consuming ways to feel the way we want to feel if we ever want our leisure time back. Problem is, true leisure is the most likely place we’ll find it.

 

Stay Positive & Oh, The Irony. Sensitivity Has Left Us Senseless.

Garth E. Beyer

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The Imagination Generation

Garth Beyer

Previous generations had it easy didn’t they? Much easier than us anyway.

They didn’t have electronics to take them to a new world. They didn’t have the ability to Google all the things they love, the items they didn’t have or even focus on working hard to get them. They had a simple life. Hard, yes. But simple.

Our generation and any hereafter can Google more and further than our imaginations could previously take us. We Google surreal images, pictures representative of predictive futuristic consumerism. We now Google thinking it will help, yet we do very little or nothing that blogs suggest, that articles advise, that pictures inspire, that the world needs. We waste our time Googling for two reasons.

1. We seek safety, security and the knowledge that “everything is alright”. The same reason, in fact, as why you check Twitter and Facebook 20 times a day to see that everything is okay, nothing serious has happened. We never think that maybe, if something serious were to happen, if our security was breached, if we felt unsafe, that we may just feel it and know? Do we really think Googling, checking News, Twitter feed and Facebook will really be the primary acknowledgment that we are in trouble? No.

(It does good to take a moment to realize that this process is what has put us in trouble)

2. Our imaginations have been released, but not far enough. We search and stretch our minds as far as the web will let us extend them and then we feel like we got there ourselves, accomplished. We feel that since we imagined it, that it is real, attainable and easily reached. The ability to see and understand that which would not be attainable without the web is creating a surge of jobs not filled, inventions not made, and ideas not created. It is as though whatever is on the web is as far as the mind can reach, but this is false.

What you can Google, discover on Twitter, view and share on Facebook can well be used as a bridge to a further discovery. They are not your destinations, they are someone else’s and this means that there is a calling upon you to take what you view and learn to improve it, make it better, and most importantly add your imagination to it.

Or you can simply avoid this roadblock and let your imagination run as wild as possible. Of course, by doing this you will only find out that you can actually go further than what is proposed on the web, what can be dreamt of, created and achieved by another.

 

Stay Positive & It’s Sort Of A Win-Win

Garth E. Beyer

What It Means to Be A Minimalist

Garth Beyer

Being a minimalist isn’t entirely about throwing out all you have and settling for less. Ask any minimalist, there is no settling and very few things get thrown out (apart from when you transition from being a stereotypical consumer *see end).

Being a minimalist is about being satisfied with what you have. It’s about living in Zen, not trying to live in it.  After all, you know what they say about Zen. The only Zen you find on the top of the mountain, is the Zen you bring up there.

Being a minimalist does not mean you can’t have wants, it just means that your wants are the same as your needs. The reason so few can become minimalistic is that it takes a powerful mind and an even more powerful understanding of what you need to live, to be content, to be happy or whatever word you want to use for a quality of life.

Being a minimalist isn’t completely about having money, saving money or spending money. A minimalist can save all the money they make but it doesn’t bring them happiness or excitement in having a lot of money. What it does bring is freedom and peace. Minimalist’s think neither of having money saved or spending the saved money.

Being a minimalist is a mental state. A state in which is content  and happy with the avoidance of negativity, arguments and emotional attachments.

Being a minimalist does not mean that they can carry all of their possessions in a backpack or suitcase. It means that whatever the size of case it takes to contain their items, it bears no weight.

Lastly, being  minimalist is about minimizing to a degree you’re comfortable with, a phase in which you are free.

 

Stay Positive & Try Freedom, Not Torture

Garth E. Beyer