I was standing in a queue at a makeup store with my one bottle of foundation and sad-looking eyebrow brush when I saw a horde of young teens descend on the shop like the biblical plague of locusts.
Polished to within an inch of their lives and looking like they all belonged in a Diet Coke advert, they swept through the premises, rattling their little metal cage baskets and filling them to the brim with bath products and makeup.
They weren’t really looking at price tags and were picking up multiples of the same item. I stood there wondering how they planned to get through the sheer amount of product they were holding and felt like I was watching some scientific experiment.
Maybe it’s because many millennials were raised by parents whose parents were war survivors, or maybe there wasn’t enough choice, but I don’t remember consumption ever being as conspicuous as it is today.
Then again, given what is being constantly shown on social media, can we blame people for wanting what others seem to have endless supplies of?
Just a few days ago, I saw a self-care routine that must have cost thousands. Gone are the days when self-care was a face mask, a tub of ice cream, and a bottle of bargain-bin wine. Now everyone is seeing overflowing baths with several bath bombs and bubble bath liquids in them, custom-made wooden trays hovering over tubs with seven kinds of dessert on them, warmed towels, and a projector to screen all your favourite shows on the wall while you take a soak.
When we see supposed ‘normal people’ doing all this on a random Tuesday, is it any wonder that our expectations of what makes a happy life keep increasing?
The more this kind of content becomes normalised and celebrated, the harder it will be for young people to see the value of simpler things. If you’re constantly raised in a culture that celebrates excess, then it’s going to be very hard for you to manage your expectations as you get older.
There’s nothing wrong with being aspirational as long as you understand that what you see on social media is not really the average day in the life of someone because it’s all paid for by advertisers.
We need to stop exchanging our financial stability and the possibility of more significant, more meaningful moments for expensive bumps of dopamine that have nothing to do with loving ourselves.
What consumes your mind controls your life.
