This was a really wonderful video, especially for going one step further, turning the camera around and perceiving that the same mindset can create Marxist, Feminist and Vegan identities, too.

I appreciate that you made the point that there should be a distinction between consumption and consumables. Thanks for that!

I enjoyed this. For a while, I got pulled into the minimalism trend, and found myself refusing to buy things that didn't serve a functional purpose in my daily life. Eventually, I realized that in doing so, I was both inadvertently altering my daily life to adhere to this sort of practicality fetish, and in a kind of conceptual way, refusing to acknowledge the existential value I put into the things I care about, which left me feeling kind of unmoored. I've since come to accept that owning a little statue of Mulan is a personally valid way to signal, to myself, a connection to a past iteration of myself and to affirm the values and enjoyment that drew me to that movie as a kid. It leads me to wonder about the significance we attribute to consumables/consumption in so far as we're living in a capitalistic society and inundated with consumption narratives. On the one hand, there's something compelling about dismissing consumerism/cultivated identity as artificial (or a signifier to deeper, real meaningful aspects of existing as a human), but on the other, it seems like our relationships with media, retailers, and our personal history of managing consumption have a more tangible claim to "realness" than the extrapolated connections to philosophical underpinnings (or whatever). To some extent, I guess I'm wondering in what ways could cultivating an identity be considered a genuine way to experience a society in which cultivating an identity is the thing people do?