Prodcut I gave away: Amir Travel Power Strip
How’s it goin everybody this is beat the bush the title of this video is i shop therefore i am not today i’m going to talk about why we consume so much and why we buy so many expensive things that we actually do not need i do my fisher of overconsumption just like anybody else in the us but i do try to keep it as low as i can before anything happens you probably
Saw an advertisement maybe one of your friends had one of these or maybe you saw on the solution of media post then you get to a point where you really really want the item and you have this feeling where you cannot live without it maybe you could imagine that after you get it life will be so much better after you get it now i think it’s really good to know exactly
What’s happening in your mind just so that you can know what the advertisements is doing to you once you know the driving force behind your purchase you can then choose to buy it or not resulting from your own personal free thought rather than just kind of going with the flow and not realizing that certain things are controlling your thought process and making you
Buy the item but let me dissect this and really show you why we buy certain items and you buy something you might not be aware of it but you might be buying it to raise your own social status after you buy certain items your sugar cool status will actually increase you could be more will we expected you could be praised upon you can even get preferential treatment
Just from what you own for example if you have a really nice car people do tend to treat you differently just because of your nice car a middle credit card could also earn praise among people because when people see it they would respect you and maybe like a server or something maybe they’ll give you a free appetizer or whatnot just preferential treatment another
Example if the person has the latest iphone gadgets or whatnot they tend to get more dates than people that we don’t so this is interesting now how do you tell if you bind something for the social status or if you’re buying it strictly for the utility you can do this simple test if you buy this thing and no one ever sees it and you still like it then quite possibly
You’re buying it for the utility for example if you buy something just for yourself maybe it’s only in your bedroom or something and no one else would ever see it and you don’t ever talk about it either then that item could quite possibly just be for you chillie having a luxurious item could provoke and me among other people and envy could actually result in pain
And the other person’s people are envious and then maybe they wanted for themselves or envy could be the goodwill type of envy where people are actually happy for you that you got that certain item now let me cover tv and commercials people usually say oh yeah you know you watch too much tv you get brainwashed you watch too much commercials then you start to
Follow whatever they say i feel like i am the experiment because i watch the tv i sort of catch myself doing certain things and i’m like why the heck did i do that like i don’t know about this product before how come i’m buying this now for example this silk milk thing i was drinking milk and also nicely the that silk milk commercial you know with that crazy man
That like how this crazy eyeball smile thing anyway the first time i watched it no you know i’m not going to buy any silk milk i think they must have been like 20 times i watched that commercial over the length of watching many different shows well one time i’m like well maybe i don’t want to try milk let me be more healthy and like try some almond milk so then i
Actually bought the silk milk it was a totally bad idea because when i brought home i drank it it tasted really bad because i mainly use it as a creamer and apparently when you mix it with milk tea it doesn’t really cream anything so i wouldn’t have really gotten brainwashed with the silk milk thing it wouldn’t even occur to me to buy that if i didn’t watch all
Those commercials another point is about half a year ago they started selling these oreo thin and what happened was quite interesting i think i saw that commercial maybe five times and i happen to be a grocery store and i’m like well you know maybe i want to try some of those thin oreos i went to the aisle where they have a thin oreos and i looked for in that aisle
They were actually all gone and when i thought that i couldn’t get it then suddenly i realized oh my gosh probably a lot of people were watching the same exact commercial and they went to rush to get it so right then and there i realized oh my gosh um it’s the commercial that they did right it’s the repetitive commerce when repeated enough times it just sort of
Gets ingrained in your brain so next time when you do it you would be more likely to buy that item because it’s in your mind it’s fresh in your mind you remember that item and then you go oh yeah why don’t i give it a try so just remember whenever something is repeated to you enough times especially in commercials and stuff then it starts to kind of wear you down
And the next time you go buy something you would just kind of like appear in your mind and then you’re going to start buying it i was researching online about overconsumption and how this actually drives our economy i realize this is a strange thing to research but it’s just something that’s got me interested and i’m wondering hey what if everyone is frugal what
Will happen to the economy because if people aren’t spending then maybe the call economy will collapse this led me to this bernard mandeville philosopher / economist guy let me paraphrase his work where he says over consumptions really drives our economy if all of a sudden we’re all made virtuous which means we’re not doing any overconsumption we’re only consuming
What we need and we go and pursue our own passions or only to benefit others then the economy will essentially collapse and we’ll all go to living a simple but they’re poor life and yet very virtuous it’s a phrase they like to use is without private vices there exists no public benefit so what this is kind of saying is that each person is trying to do things for
Their own benefit their own gain and in doing so they’re inadvertently helping the economy because we’re all overspending and we’re trying to make ourselves look good that’s why we go to work and continue this rat race cycle we’re actually helping the economy advance quite a bit therefore having a lot of public benefit so that’s what political leaders keep on
Saying yeah you need to go out and spend money push the economy forward and yes it’s true when people go out and spend their paycheck it props up their economy everything does well businesses those well everything goes well so you cannot really hate overcome too much you cannot go oh look at those people you’re spending so much money that’s crazy i rather be frugal
And save myself because those overspent ders is actually driving the economy the economy could mean it’s sort of like self driving because you got some people that are overspending they show off and then other people see a and then go oh my gosh are envious so then they buy some more so it becomes a vicious cycle this is in the sense that when people over consume
Is actually really killing the earth actually because it’s taking out all the resources and all this stuff goes in the landfill is just ruining the whole earth and and it cannot continue this way for a much longer so like i said in the earlier video that early retirement it’s only possible when all the other people are over consuming you need most of people or we
Consuming so then a small percentage of those people can earn a really high wage retire early while all the other people are driving the economy forward in the comments of the early retirement videos people have argued that even if everybody spend less the economy will be doing ok because things would balance itself well not according to this philosopher bernard
Mandeville because if everyone’s going to be cheap and only spend what they need then essentially you’re not going to be moving the economy forward you’re not going to be producing better and better stuff so it’s argument is that if everyone is striving to be early retirees then everyone’s going to end up being dirt poor so i think this is a really interesting
Thing to be aware because once you’re aware it’s like you step out of the matrix coming in and go oh my gosh i cannot believe this has been happening to me all the time because i’ve been buying a lot of stuff and only now these days i realized that hey maybe i didn’t really have to buy all those things maybe i was kind of pushed towards doing those things from
Advertisements for magazines or whatnot so i hope you enjoy thinking about consumerism this way today i’m actually giving away an amir international travel power strip i made a review over here and in one of my other channels which is beat the bush tech yeah i have a bunch of other channels now because i don’t want to flood this channel with tech review videos of
These gadget things so how do you win just comment down below within the first two or three days the one with the most likes will win this power strip so give me a like on this video comment down below make something witty so that you win the power strip don’t forget i have a patreon over here and subscribe thanks for watching
Transcribed from video
I Shop Therefore I Am | BeatTheBush By BeatTheBush