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f0rrestA few days ago, I ate an entire sleeve of saltines in one sitting, and I washed it down with a can of Diet Cherry Coke®. You may be wondering, “What’s so interesting about that?” And my answer would be, “Not much.” But it does raise a few questions, the first being: Why?
No one can truly answer this question. It’s quite possibly one of the greatest mysteries in the entire universe. Why? But more specifically, why do we do stupid shit? We are constantly doing stupid shit, usually impulsively and almost always to our own detriment. I no longer question why other people do stupid shit, I just accept it and move on, and this brings about a certain inner peace, but I do question why I do stupid shit. I analyze it constantly. But it seems that, no matter how much analyzing I do, I’m still doing the stupid shit. I did not need those saltines. I knew that. Before I even walked into the kitchen, I knew that. I had known that for years. I knew that eating the saltines was a pointless, stupid endeavor. I just had an impulsive urge to eat them. Even as I was walking from my office to the kitchen, I was thinking to myself, “I probably shouldn’t eat the saltines, they’re just a bunch of empty, carby calories that’ll give me heartburn and make me feel sluggish and gross.” Yet, despite having these thoughts, I still opened the pantry drawer, slid the crinkly sleeve out of the blue-and-white receptacle, got myself a Coca-Cola® Cherry Zero Sugar® from the fridge, brought both products to my office, then opened and consumed them both within the span of roughly 7 minutes. That’s what I did. I consumed the products. In hindsight, it felt like I was overcome by some uncontrollable gluttonous urge, some biological impulse that could not be sated without consuming the products. And, in that moment, as I was consuming the products, it felt good to consume them.
So maybe that’s why we do stupid shit: it feels good in the moment. But does it really? Does it really feel good when even the simplest of everyday activities, e.g. eating saltine crackers and drinking diet soda, cause so much cognitive dissonance?
Later that same night, right before going to bed, I had yet another stupid-shit urge. I was on my PC and clicked an article about the MacBook Neo®. The article talked about how the Neo is the most affordable MacBook® ever made, how the 13” LiquidRetina™ display looks stunning even in direct sunlight due to its 500 nits of brightness (whatever the fuck that means), how the Magic Keyboard™ feels like typing on air due to how low-profile it is, yet somehow it's still clicky and satisfying to use, how the aluminum body is sleek and durable and feels like holding a straight slab of metal in your hands, how it’s super portable due to its small form factor, being only slightly larger than a classic netbook-class laptop, and how it has a super-powerful processor, especially for the price. The article said you would be a fool not to buy one. And as the article was making all these points, I was just nodding along the whole time, buying into all the bullshit, practically drooling for some reason, which is super strange considering that I’ve gone on record stating, “I will never buy an Apple product, ever.”
But, thinking back now, my dislike of Apple wasn’t really based on what I would now consider valid reasoning. I had no true qualms with the hardware or software. It was all vibes and ego. In fact, I’ve barely ever used Apple products. The only Mac I ever had was an iMac G3® in Bondi Blue coloring, one of those big fat boys with the translucent bodies, and this was at the turn of the millennium when I was like ten years old, and I only used the thing to play point-and-click Pajama Sam and Blue’s Clues games. So, I have no real experience with Macs. Yet, at some point in my teenage years, I had decided that Macs were for tech-illiterate dipshits and rich yuppies whom I did not want to be associated with, even though I was very much part of that latter demographic, albeit not by choice, for who has the luxury of picking their parents? The point is, back then, I saw Windows and Apple as camps, and I was willing to die for my camp, so to speak. But now, thinking about it, it seems kind of silly, falling into one of these dualistic consumerist camps, especially considering that my previous distaste for Apple products probably stemmed from some vestige of teenage rebellion. “Fuck you, Steve. You’re not my real father.”
I had always thought of Mac owners as having a certain vibe, like they all live in neighborhoods where the houses range from 700k–1m and everyone plays tennis on the weekends and there's a neighborhood watch and girls sell Thin Mints® on the corner near the stop sign. I picture this one family, “The Apple Family,” in which the mom is like an ex-punk or goth or something, the dad is always away on business, and the quiet teenage daughter has a Samurai X poster on her wall and Bjork CDs scattered all over her desk and also has one of those electronic drawing pads for her MacBook®. In this family, the mom and daughter are both talented artists. The mom draws flowers and landscapes, while the daughter draws anime stuff. They both dye their hair in accordance with the month of the year. They have an unbreakable mother-daughter bond, meaning they are really close, like super-duper close, so close that it's almost as if they can communicate telepathically from any distance. It goes without saying that Gilmore Girls is always playing on the living room TV, even when nobody is around. Sometimes they watch House and Grey's Anatomy, too. The mom also drives a Mini Cooper®, does yoga, hangs framed pictures of David Bowie on the walls, and puts up Nightmare Before Christmas decorations all over the place, so the house has a slightly alternative vibe to it, but not too alternative, not enough to scare off the normie neighbors who visit sometimes. The mom also wears glasses and has a smoking problem that she does a very poor job of hiding, and she always talks about how she "used to see Siouxsie & the Banshees live back in the 80s but I can’t remember it very much because of all the drugs, haha.” And, again, her husband is always away on long trips, hawking software to corporate executives or selling cars or something like that; actually, no one really knows how he makes money, it's a mystery, but he somehow makes enough to pay the mortgage and buy all sorts of Apple products for the family, which they all prefer over Windows because “Apple just works.” And the dad is actually the girl's stepdad, not her real dad. Her real dad lives a few states away, looks like the BTK Killer, and was horribly abusive to her, which left her with all sorts of deep psychic baggage that she won’t talk about to anyone except her mom. The girl in question here is pale, and she looks kind of like Kirsten Dunst, and she likes to draw and watch Cowboy Bebop and cuddle on the basement couch with her boyfriend whom she won't go any further than making out with, and that annoys the boyfriend somewhat because he's an insufferable prick, and she deserves better. She also has a cat named Pickles.
If this all feels oddly specific, well, it’s not. That was just a little writing exercise I was doing. It’s not like I was describing a particular family I used to spend a lot of time with back in high school who were actually very sweet people or anything like that. And it’s certainly not like I was in love with that girl who exclusively used a MacBook® and dyed her hair in coordination with the months of the year and watched Cowboy Bebop and drew anime on her electronic drawing pad. It’s not like I was her boyfriend or anything like that. It’s not like I’m actually pining for them, nostalgically. That's not what's happening here. It’s not like, when I was reading that MacBook Neo® article, I was thinking about this girl and her family who are totally fictional and like not real at all. It’s not like images of that beautiful girl and her upper middle-class house on the hill and her weird, punky family were flashing through my mind when reading the aforementioned article. It’s not as though I was, without realizing it, buying the MacBook Neo® in some sort of sad attempt to reclaim something I’d lost a long, long time ago or anything like that. That would be sad and pathetic and ridiculous.
In fact, I had been toying around with the idea of getting a Mac for a few weeks before reading the article, because I felt like a change was needed, and I like trying new things sometimes, and I think the MacBooks® look sleek and I wanted to see her again and the OS interface looks minimalistic and cool, but buying a Mac wasn’t really something I was serious about until I read the article, at which point I became instantly serious about it for some reason. I became giddy and excited. It was as if I had become overcome by some consumeristic urge that could not be sated without buying the product. So that’s what I did. I bought the product. I instantly whipped out my credit card, went to the Apple website, put a silver MacBook Neo® in the cart, and went through the whole checkout process. And as I was keying in my credit card information, the little angel on my shoulder was whispering to me, “Isn’t this a little impulsive? This won’t bring her back, you know. Shouldn’t we think about this a little more? We have a perfectly good ThinkPad® on the desk right over there, and you love that thing, you’ve written many stories and essays on it, you can’t just replace it like that, after all it’s done for you, can you? What are you, some kind of monster?” but of course I ignored the angel, typed in my CVC code, and hit the big PURCHASE button, at which point my brain was flooded with endorphins and I was overcome by all sorts of anticipatory joys and jitters.
Please note, this is not a brag or anything. I’m not typing this up to subtly be like, “Hey, look at me, I can afford to buy a new MacBook® on some stupid nostalgic whim because I think it will make me feel like I’m dating the girl of my dreams again.” This is not what I’m doing, especially the “girl of my dreams” part, that is NOT what’s going on here.
If I’m being honest, I experience some sort of sudden onset consumeristic urge like this more often than I'd like to admit. One might think these urges are normal, similar to the eat-a-sleeve-of-saltines-in-7-minutes urge, but the buy-a-MacBook® urge is actually uniquely distinct. We are born with a drive to consume food, it's biological, but we are not born with the drive to purchase aluminum junk, the latter is driven by societal norms and corporate mind control. Caveman John does not wake up in the morning and think to himself, “I need a fucking MacBook®,” of course he doesn’t. He doesn’t know what a MacBook® is. He’s a caveman. He just cares about CAVE and defending himself from bears and BOOM BOOM and obtaining the sharpest stick. So maybe he’s not the best example. But the point is, the consumeristic urge to purchase things comes from some hardcore materialist indoctrination, which is human-created, i.e. not biological, which is forced upon us from the very young age of forever ago. We do not need the MacBooks®. We are manipulated by corporate tech oligarchies (apologies for using the hyper-liberal, Reddit buzzwords, but they happen to fit in this context) into wanting the MacBooks®. They have ace marketing teams full of people who graduated from Stern and Ross School of Business or whatever coming up with ad campaigns that make you feel like, if you choose Apple, you are hip and trendy and a cut above the rest of the Windoze plebs. They use hip slogans like, “The ones who choose iMac® are the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels,” as if using your hard-earned blood dollars on corporate silicon is some sort of anti-establishment statement or something. It’s all fucking phony.
But my point is, if we can recognize this, that this consumeristic urge to buy stupid shit is not biologically hardwired into us, that we’re essentially being manipulated into doing this stupid shit by tech bros who only care about getting us hooked on 4k LiquidRetina™ displays and Magic Keyboards™ so that they can line their own already gold-trimmed pockets, then we can resist it. We can resist the consumeristic urges. We can stop letting them tell us, “If you buy this, she might come back.” We can stop letting them manipulate our emotions. We can fight back. It’s not like we need fancy plastic for survival. We can just stop buying their shit.
We can overcome this.
But damn, this keyboard sure does feel nice.
