More of everything. Whether you asked for it or not.
Rent the Runway promised to liberate us from closet guilt. Depop promised to turn our old junk into cash. Together, they've somehow convinced us that the solution to too much stuff is a more sophisticated relationship with too much stuff.
Brands now know more about you than your therapist does, and unlike your therapist, they will act on that information at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday. Hyper-personalized marketing promised to give us exactly what we want — and it delivered, in the most unsettling way imaginable.
Your phone has 47 unread notifications right now, and approximately zero of them are from someone who genuinely misses you. We've sleepwalked into a world where apps have colonized our attention with the aggression of a timeshare salesman, and somehow we handed them the keys ourselves. Here's how it happened — and why we can't stop letting it.
Somewhere in the back of your closet, behind the capsule wardrobe you assembled with great intention and the cottagecore phase you don't talk about anymore, there are approximately forty garments you have worn fewer than three times. They are not vintage. They are not investments. They are the physical residue of an algorithm that convinced you abundance is the same thing as style — and charged you $34.99 for the privilege.
The average American household now pays for more streaming services than they have functional remote controls, yet somehow the television stays tuned to the same three shows they've already seen twice. Welcome to subscription hoarding: the hobby you didn't know you had, and definitely can't afford.
Silicon Valley spent a decade perfecting the art of turning your existential dread into a revenue stream, and honestly, the craftsmanship is impressive. We can't look away from the worst possible version of the news, and it turns out that's not a bug — it's the whole business model.
We cut the cord to escape the tyranny of cable bundles, and somehow ended up with twelve separate tyrannies instead. Americans are now spending more on streaming than they ever did on cable, with the added bonus of spending forty-five minutes deciding what to watch before giving up entirely. Welcome to the golden age of television, where the gold is mostly debt.
There is a woman on YouTube who just ate four pounds of crab legs and 64 ounces of ramen, and six million people watched her do it. Nobody is entirely sure why. The performance of having too much — too much food, too many packages, too much money, too much stuff — has become one of the defining content formats of our era, and the platforms enabling it are making an absolute fortune off our collective fascination.