What Did You Get For Christmas? 2019-12-24

The last couple of weeks I have been posting links on Facebork to images of shitty working conditions, child labour, and various factory disasters. The idea is that a lot of the crap people "give" for Christmas is made by people who have it pretty shitty relative to the people who will ultimately be receiving it. Nobody goes out looking to overpay on their gifts, they go out looking for a bargain... and getting a bargain is a pretty good sign that the item may have been made in a sweatshop, possibly by children. We are so far separated from the people who make the things we use every second of the day that it is hard to have any idea what the real cost of these items is.

I stole this image from the link above.

It is easy to tell ourselves that "it's just one or two gifts", "I bought it from a reputable company", or "I really needed that thing" but those are empty things we tell ourselves to justify the shittiness we impose on the people who made the items. We figure we have to buy some gifts, like for the secret santa at work or for that relative who always sends something... but we don't have to. We can come up with all kinds of justifications, but the truth is that most of what gets bought at Christmas simply isn't needed by anyone and much of it will end up stored in a basement only to be brought out if you visit or perhaps in the ocean breaking up in to smaller and smaller pieces of plastic until they become part of the great garbage patch.

It is so unfortunate that this shittiness is simply not necessary. It only exists because we [generally speaking] accept it as an inevitability. Seriously, just consider not being a consumerholic. Be honest with yourself and think about whether or not continuing to run on the treadmill of stuff is actually going to make you happier.