A Challenge to Our Generation

A 28-year-old marketing specialist in Beijing

Ihad regarded myself a frugal person until the third year into my career, when I sorted out my belongings before moving house. I was surprised to find a stock of hair masks, toner, sunscreen, and other cosmetic products that could not have been used up before expiry. Most of them were purchased during shopping festivals and promotions, some for reasons I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t help but start to re-examine my shopping behaviour and ask myself the question: Why do I shop?

Buying things has never been easier with the rise of e-commerce platforms and online payment services. We can do it in the subway, in our offices, or while standing in a queue. With a smartphone, we can access hundreds of millions of products. We are all tempted to buy more as the tentacles of consumption are stretching infinitely: shopping apps with social functions, livestreaming celebrities with great influence, pompous rich people connecting belongings to identity on social media, etc.

But what does consumption bring? For some, it may be an effective way to cope with stress from work or raise their status at workplace, but there is no doubt that prolonged and massive consumption brings about a sense of emptiness. As French author and philosopher Jean Baudrillard said in his book, objects form a system that controls people. You don’t own your objects; you are bewitched by the signs, of which objects are a part.

This year, Taobao did not release its sales figures during the just-concluded Double 11 shopping festival. In previous years it would have been a hot topic of market discussion in the days that followed. Are people waking up to the drawbacks of excessive shopping, or is this just an intermission in a long battle with consumerism? We don’t know. I was reading Baudrillard’s The Consumer Society today but still clicked on Taobao out of habit to check the delivery progress during breaks. There has never been a time with higher material abundance than today. While we enjoy conditions that our predecessors could only dream of, we are burdened with the pressure to break out of our consumer society.