In this day and age, I’ve found it difficult to buy new beautiful things. I think it’s related to the over consumption that is so prevalent in our culture bur more importantly I think it’s due to social media’s impact on my life.
Recently my son was sick for two weeks. The poor little guy, so much congestion and intermittent fever. Thankfully it never got out of hand, but we were couch-ridden for most of those two weeks. Now my kiddo is still small, he just turned three and when he’s sick I inevitable become sick too. Moreover, when he’s sick I must be beside him/touching him at all times. He becomes a class-one Velcro toddler, which is hard because he was a Velcro baby, and I was just getting used to having my body be mind again. Lol
Not so fast mamma. So for the entirety of these past few weeks I was stuck on the sofa with my little one. Now for the second week I was able to work because he was starting to feel better, but that first week was punctuated with vomiting along with everything else. My poor little guy had so much congestion runny down the back of his throat that eventually two things would happen. One: his tummy would become upset by all the snot and he would vomit it all up, or two: he would start coughing from the constant dripping which would lead to the same conclusion. Vomit.
I hate vomit.
So, I needed to stay close to him which meant that if I wanted to do something else than stare out the window (this was February mind you) I choose to spend the days scrolling on my phone. Now this didn’t feel too good when I’m on the other side of it all, but the capitalism and consumption is exceptionally hard to filter out when you are on Instagram all day.
So back to beautiful things. I saw so many beautiful things. All day long. Ikea hacks, plants, sunlit-filled bookcases, old books, new clothes… it just kept going and going. I noticed that I would get a massive dopamine hit from all this scrolling while at the same time planning on how I was going to re-do my entire home.
But none of that is sustainable. None of that is economical. We as humans (and those especially living in the west) do not need to buy as many things as we have. There’s so much wealth here that it’s literally coming out our noses.
During those two weeks I did stumble on some ‘de-influencing’ pages. Those that promoted wearing clothes that you’ve had for years. Re-using berry containers as sprouting spots for this year’s garden. But these accounts are few and far between because we love to buy stuff.
So stay tuned for beautiful things and beautiful people but know that theirs is an undercurrent of over-consumption in our culture that is doing us no good at all.