Forced Overconsumption
By Sabrina Wang
January 2025
Congrats, you just bought the new iPhone 16! This is exciting news—not only can you doom scroll TikTok and Instagram, but everything is shinier, faster, newer…..until it's not. In around one year, your screen is cracked, your battery life has a hard time living, and your phone spends its days in update purgatory. By the time you know it, the iPhone 17 has come out, and your “brand new” phone is now ancient technology.
No, I’m not targeting you. Millions of users face the same problem every day due to forced overconsumption: when corporations, often driven by profit motives, engage in planned obsolescence (Peluso). This refers to how products are specifically designed to have an uncomfortably short lifespan so that you’ll be forced back to the doorsteps of that very same Apple store to buy the newest iPhone 1928475. In addition, not only does each “update” seem much more expensive for no particular reason, but the quality also seems to diminish per release… You start thinking at some point: is this intentional?
Corporations are now more desperate than ever to get your attention. Especially when the market is saturated, businesses are no longer looking to sell you JUST one product, but everything they have in stock. Simply stated, it’s becoming much more profitable to sell more to each current customer than to search for new leads, especially with the growth of technology. With the amount of time I spend on Instagram, they could probably track my entire day of activities and find out about my recent obsession with Jellycats, but I digress. What continues then is tons of large corporations will buy said data and as a result, learn about the buying behaviour, quirks, and dating life of their demographics, producing appealing ads that pull consumers in.
What’s scarier? Corporations are slowly learning to capitalize on your everyday life as well! It sure feels like I buy Apple AirPods because I like their convenience in my life, but realistically it's also about the FOMO (fear of missing out). Why does everyone own Apple? Surely, it wouldn’t be because Apple has the best camera quality. It’s more about the status that a corporation sells you when you buy their products, the feeling of being closer to your dream life because you own an Apple pencil (please don’t sue me Apple).
Unfortunately, this trend goes beyond products. Take Vicky: she just bought a new gym membership to work out and become the “better version” of herself. In most cases, three months have gone by and she’s been there twice, once to sign up, and the second to take a tour of the facility. Slowly, this prescription that comes with a free motivational quote and a nasty shower room conveniently becomes easier and easier to forget, until it shows up in your bank statement every month. This trend of “subscribing but not owning” has allowed businesses to acquire a steady stream of profit while capitalizing on customers. Quite an irresistible model if you ask me.
So while yes, overconsumption is a huge win for corporations, it’s a massive loss for consumers. We’re left with problems including shortened product life cycles, financial strain on individuals, and unsustainable practices creeping up our conscience. Forced overconsumption may be a huge deal, but companies won’t care—not until they run Earth dry. Until then, we’ll be stuck in this endless loop of accumulating and overconsuming, one “deal” at a time.
Work Cited
Peluso, Cody. “What causes overconsumption & overshoot?” Population Media Center, 18 January 2024, https://www.populationmedia.org/the-latest/why-does-the-earth-overshoot. Accessed 12 November 2024.