I am a woman.
I have been sold to all my life.
In this amazing time of profound technological advances I too am now able to be sold.
They can sell me without me ever removing my eyes from the screen.
It is incredible how frictionless it is to become commodified. And, in the real magic, somehow we frictionlessly ended up participating in this market. You cannot ignore the social capital gained by following trends. By continuously buying clothes in the right cuts, from the right stores, at the right, often high, prices. The pressure to look a certain way. A way that can only be achieved by specific products, shown to you through a video on a screen by a woman who, in almost all circumstances, is lying to you about how easy her life is, in order for you to buy the product using a link, so she can get pennies from the purchase. Pennies she puts into the piggy bank that allow her to inch closer to achieving the easy and smooth life she pretends she currently has. But she already knows that the second she could achieve the life she pretends to live now, she’ll be expected to live an even more glamorous and luxurious life, and she will be stuck in the cycle of pretending. So she gets under lights that wash out the texture in her face and tells people about a serum that changed her life. We women must keep up. So we buy, so that we retain whatever status rung we’ve only just begun to cling onto. And we buy the next serum. Without ever examining the sway of the motion that compels us to do so. And we buy the next shine. We don’t think about what we have allowed ourselves to be swept up in. And the next smell. And the next health. And the next word and phrase. And the next organ to care about. And the neighborhood to eat in and the neighborhood to live in. And we are washed away into the sea of commodity and they tell us that is is calm waters. I am so far away from the shore that I don’t even know who I would be if I made my way to the sand.
Is that it? Am I afraid of the environment I will find myself in if I pull out of the current? Am I more afraid to look inside myself at what primordial deficiency I feel inside myself can be solved with currency? But I am already in fear and if I feel it already, how could it be any worse to admit out loud that I don’t know who I would be if all the commodity was stripped away from me.
I don’t think I am capable of swimming in this current anymore, but I don’t know if I am strong enough to break out of it and go out on my own. I want to scream “I am my own, I belong to myself and I belong to those I love, I belong to the ideas that move me” but then I would have to lie with myself in the bed that I bought from a global retailer, because it was the easy place to buy from. And stare across the room to my vanity littered with beauty products that I will not use in this lifetime if I do not give a concerted effort to using them up. Beauty products that are so easy to look at, and to move from one location to another without ever asking why.
I perform a material Decartes. If he went through all that he knew about the universe and rejected it unless he could prove it through his own senses, leaving him with the first principle, the