Yesterday’s article analyzed the listing of Ant. It analyzed that Jiebei and Huabei accounted for 39% of Ant Group’s revenue. It also analyzed that the current dazzling array of consumer loans has stimulated many young people. People, even college students, have early entered the habit of overdraft consumption. While enjoying the temporary pleasure brought by consumerism, they fall into a vicious cycle of using debt to support debt.

After the article was published, many readers also felt very disgusted with such a phenomenon of prevalent consumerism and endless consumer loans.

This is actually not an isolated case. Although there are no authoritative statistics on the current borrowing ratio among young people and college students.

But judging from our daily contact, the current group of young people and college students have entered the debt-paying industry early due to overdraft consumption.

So today’s article will specifically talk about the current situation. Rising consumerism and entertaining yourself to death.

Consumerism is a new phenomenon that emerged after human civilization entered the era of industrialization.

Before the industrialization era, the overall level of human productivity was still seriously insufficient. In this case, let alone consumerism, everyone could basically have three meals a day and work from sunrise to sunrise. The pattern of life is a state of low desire, and there is usually no entertainment life.

At that time, only the princes and nobles were qualified to consume their surplus.

Therefore, in ancient times when productivity was insufficient, consumerism was impossible.

However, after capitalism entered the industrialization era, the productivity level developed dramatically due to technological advancement, making it the first time in human history that productivity greatly exceeded the level of daily human consumption.

At first, this was very unaccustomed to human beings, because suddenly from the relatively depleted consumption concept in ancient times to such an era of overproduction, human living habits cannot be changed at once. come over.

As a result, the Great Depression occurred in 1929, which was essentially a problem of overcapacity caused by excessive productivity.

Later, in order to solve this problem, these capitalists came up with a way to promote "consumerism".

Since the current productivity level has long exceeded people's daily needs, it is necessary to continue to stimulate people to consume things that they do not usually need.

Human beings continue to consume surplus consumption beyond their daily needs, which is the so-called consumerism.

So in Western countries, frugality is no longer a virtue, but a sign of not knowing how to enjoy life.

What follows is the prevalence of advanced consumption and overdraft consumption.

The first credit card appeared in the United States in 1950, which actually marked the entry of mankind into the era of consumerism.

In essence, consumerism is an "information cocoon" created by capitalists for more than half a century in order to maximize profits despite overcapacity.

In the consumerist information cocoon created by capitalists, excessive consumption has become "enjoying life."

This allows people to pay high amounts of money for consumption of "add-ons" that they do not originally need in their lives.

Let’s take a simple example, such as diamonds.

Diamonds are the most successful advertisements in the world.

"A diamond is forever, a diamond will last forever."

This slogan has become the most successful and most brainwashing slogan in human history.

Originally, diamonds were not a scarce commodity, and the diamond reserves on the earth were huge.

But diamond manufacturers, led by De Beers, have directly given diamonds a higher consumer value by monopolizing the supply and demand of diamonds and deeply binding diamonds to love.

Many times, consumers buy diamonds not because of how beautiful or rare they are, but just to prove that they love each other.

This is actually what capitalists do. After highly binding the pursuit of various human desires with material, they have taken away some material needs outside of daily life that humans do not really need. It directly gives higher consumption value, thus making consumers willing to spend more money to consume things that are actually dispensable.

This is consumerism.

After entering the 21st century, with the rise of the Internet, and even the advent of the mobile Internet era.

The wave of consumerism is becoming more and more popular.

Take mobile phones as an example. After the performance of mobile phones began to overflow significantly, in order to maintain mobile phone sales, capitalists still updated the new generation of mobile phones at least every year and launched a dozen or even dozens of mobile phone models. Even these There is often not much difference behind the phone models.

From the earliest cameras with only 1 million pixels, to 6 million, to 12 million, and then to 100 million pixels, they continue to stimulate people's sensory materialistic pursuit.

Later I discovered that the difference between 60 million pixels and 100 million pixels was not that big.

Single cameras evolved to dual cameras, and then from dual cameras to four cameras.

There are more and more cameras...making mobile phones look like spiders.

The purpose of mobile phone manufacturers in doing this is to maintain consumption stimulation, to stimulate consumers' materialistic senses, and to force them to constantly replace their mobile phones.

Maybe the mobile phone in our hands would not be a big problem after three years of normal use, but because of the constant publicity of this kind of innovation, we continue to change mobile phones one after another.

As a necessity of life for people in the mobile Internet era, mobile phones are indeed needed.

But replacing a mobile phone every year becomes unnecessary consumption under consumerism.

And this has become the main way for capitalists to make our profits.

It can be seen that consumerism is essentially based on various human desires. After solving the most basic survival problems, human beings do a lot of unnecessary things based on desires and under the guise of enjoying life. consumption.

What needs to be explained here is that our views on anything should be viewed dialectically.

So consumerism is also a double-edged sword, and we cannot completely conclude that it is necessarily bad.

Consumerism also has its side of promoting the progress of human society.

The constant innovation brought about by consumerism is also one of the driving forces for the progress of human society.

Take mobile phone performance as an example. If consumerism had not supported mobile phone manufacturers to continuously launch such a large number of new models every year, mobile phone performance would have been difficult to maintain rapid development every year.

It’s hard to say whether the rapid development of mobile phone performance will lead to qualitative changes, allowing us to evolve from the mobile Internet era to the next generation.

Because when people have less and less motivation to consume for improved mobile phone performance, in order to gain profits, these capitalists will rack their brains to think of new ways to stimulate our consumption, such as constantly optimizing VR/ AR, even the "immersion helmet" common in science fiction novels, and even brain-connected immersive experiences, all require capitalists to continuously evolve themselves based on the pursuit of profits, and eventually enter a similar "game" In the world of "cyberpunk"

So objectively speaking, consumerism is indeed promoting the progress of human civilization.

But at the same time we must see it.

The prevalence of consumerism has brought about a lot of waste of resources. How many mobile phones are scrapped every year? How much energy resources are wasted due to unnecessary consumption? The unnecessary garbage generated is also How many?

These are astronomical figures one after another.

At the same time, consumption must be within one’s ability.

For a rich man with an annual income of tens of millions, it is natural for him to spend whatever he wants.

However, those who are deeply poisoned by consumerism are often ordinary consumers with low financial capabilities.

On the contrary, these rich people with annual incomes of tens of millions, the money they earn every year has long exceeded the limit of their personal consumption.

This makes "investmentism" more popular among the wealthy class than consumerism.

That is to say, the richer a person is, the more he advocates investment and the more he likes to use money to make money.

On the contrary, the less wealthy people are, the more they need to satisfy some of their desires through consumerism to achieve the so-called "exquisite life".

So, this will bring about a result.

Rich people get richer.

Poor people become poorer because they cannot save money.

Most of the money I usually earn is spent on moonlight.

If things go on like this, it will bring about a new result, which is the solidification of classes.

Developed countries such as Europe and the United States, after the Great Depression in 1929, and especially after World War II, basically entered a state of continuous solidification of classes.

To a certain extent, consumerism is also used by the wealthy class to deprive ordinary people of the possibility of breaking through the class through "unrestrained consumption".

Because these wealthy classes are basically the capitalist class, which is the class that vigorously promotes consumerism.

Here's another example.

Consumerism has a deep and organic combination with another current popular culture.

It is the phenomenon of entertainment to death.

Entertainment to death, simply put, is entertainment for all, and anything can be used for entertainment.

There is nothing wrong with entertainment in itself.

In my spare time, I also play games and watch movies.

However, like excessive consumption, excessive entertainment itself is problematic.

People cannot exist purely for entertainment.

About "Entertainment to Death", it is related to the more widely circulated strategy of "pacifier fun".

Pacifier Le, actually should be another name, but considering that name may be blocked, I still use Pacifier Le.

The so-called pacifier music refers to the fact that Western countries held a meeting in San Francisco in 1995. The discussion at this meeting came to the conclusion that in the future society, only 20 people may need to work.

In my previous article, I also analyzed this future scenario with you. With the development of artificial intelligence, the manufacturing industry will become more and more intelligent, replacing a large number of repetitive assembly line jobs.

This means that in the future society may only need 20 people to feed everyone, so the other 80 people actually do not need to work.

In this case, the tertiary industry, that is, the service industry, will be highly developed, because people need a lot of services to each other to create jobs.

But this does not change the possibility that a large number of people will enter a state of having nothing to do and become "superfluous" people.

Under such circumstances, how to maintain social stability? The famous American strategist Brzezinski at the time believed that the only way to keep the 80 "marginalized" people around the world in peace was to give them They insert a "pacifier" to divert their attention and dissatisfaction, allowing them to settle into entertainment information tailored for them, and slowly lose their enthusiasm, desire to fight and ability to think.

This is the so-called pacifier strategy.

Some people believe that this pacifier strategy is a conspiracy theory.

But in fact, when we look at the development in the past twenty years, it is quite consistent with the current situation of Pacifier's strategy.

Because the phenomenon of entertainment to death already exists.

Take the game industry for example. In the past two decades, the game industry has developed rapidly and spawned one giant after another.

People spend a lot of time in virtual games and are immersed in them.

For another example, the short video platform that has emerged in recent years is a typical embodiment of pacifier music.

Through short and quick videos, people are addicted to watching videos and spend a lot of time unknowingly.

Whether it is a game or a short video platform, they all have one characteristic, which is a high degree of entertainment and addiction.

Behind the scenes, it seems that while we are immersed in entertainment, we gain happiness, but in fact it is killing our time.

This is actually a waste of our time.

Therefore, although entertainment to death is a nipple-fun strategy, I prefer that it is a strategy promoted by capitalists based on consumerism in the mobile Internet era in order to obtain more profits.

Understood in this way, it makes more sense. At least in terms of motivation, these capitalists are more motivated to pursue profits than anything else.

In the mobile Internet era, consumers’ time is profit.

The ultimate goal of almost all mobile apps is to compete for the time of each of our consumers.

So usually when we look at some statistics about mobile APPs, we can see some data, such as daily and monthly active users, and the average time each user spends on this APP.

Because in the mobile Internet era, traffic is everything.

For capitalists, flow is equal to profit, and consumer time is equal to profit.

Therefore, everyone is competing for the user’s time.

Based on this, bad situations will arise where all moral bottom lines are trampled for the sake of traffic.

Only then can we use everything for entertainment and hype, and attract attention through headlines.

Including the fan circle culture, these are essentially robbing users of their time and then making money through their time.

Therefore, when consumerism and entertainment are combined to death, the consumption concept of our young people has once again been seriously overdrawn.

For example, based on the brainwashing of fandom culture, people will make a lot of unnecessary consumption expenditures for their idols.

A song that is not very good can be sold for hundreds of millions of yuan due to the fanatical consumption of fans.

There are even bad situations where some fans, based on their professional advantages as teachers, encourage their students to pay for their idols.

There are also some fans who are just high school students. They are brainwashed or inspired by group madness and buy the same song dozens or even hundreds of times for their idols. Song.

This is hardly a normal phenomenon.

It cannot be said that this is normal consumption behavior, nor should it be taken for granted.

Another example is the naked loan news that we have seen frequently in the past two years.

Why do these young girls, without any income, take on huge debts early on, and eventually have to fall into naked loans, selling their dignity and trampling on their bottom line for a few thousand dollars?

In some nude loan news that I have read, these girls have often overdrafted all their credit cards and borrowed from all the online loan platforms before they finally borrowed the nude loan. I was desperate and couldn't borrow any more money, so I took out a naked loan.

Why do these young people with no real income borrow so much money at every turn?

The reason also lies in consumerism.

With a lot of comparisons around them and materialistic desires flowing everywhere, young people can easily fall into excessive consumption and overdraft consumption, blindly pursue the so-called enjoyment of life, constantly overdraw themselves, and embark on the path of paying debts with debts. Point of no return.

These young people who rely on debt to support their debts will either end up borrowing naked loans like some people, or they will have to rely on their parents to help them pay back the money.

If you meet someone whose family is relatively wealthy, forget it.

Many of these young people who fall into the trap of consumerism do not come from wealthy families.

Some parents see that their children owe tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of debts that they cannot afford to repay. At this time, one family tragedy after another often brews.

In this process, capitalists from all walks of life in society continue to stimulate people to enter a state of consumerism in order to pursue profits.

Including various online lending platforms, under the temptation of high profits, they are constantly lending money to these young people.

Look at the Internet companies now, which one is not engaging in these online loans in the name of Internet finance.

Just open any APP and you can often find the entrance to online loans.

Therefore, in such a situation where consumerism and entertainment are combined to death, various online loan platforms are simply killing the goose that lays eggs, and pushing our young people into one dead end after another.

Another example is the current popularity of live broadcasts, which is simply a manifestation of the trap of consumerism to its fullest extent.

Each and every anchor is almost a brainwashing propaganda, using low price strategies to lure us into various impulsive purchases.

Taiwan had a card slave crisis in 2005.

In essence, young people are trapped in the trap of consumerism and cannot consume rationally. After relying on credit cards for a long time, they eventually accumulate to a limit and suddenly collapse.

We are actually no better off now. According to data from the central bank, the total amount of credit cards that were overdue for more than six months last year was as high as 79.743 billion yuan.

By the end of the first quarter of this year, the total amount of credit cards that were overdue for six months was as high as 91.875 billion yuan.

Showing a rapid upward trend.

In addition, our residents’ leverage ratio has more than tripled in the past 12 years.

The residents’ leverage ratio in 2008 was 17.9, and by the end of 2018, our residents’ leverage ratio had reached the warning line of 60.

It took 40 years for the household leverage ratio in the United States to increase from 20 to 50.

It only took ten years for our residents’ leverage ratio to grow from 20 to 60.

This is not something to be proud of, and the financial risks behind it cannot be ignored.

Let’s look specifically at the debt ratio structure of my country’s residents.

In addition to 53.9% of liabilities are personal housing loans.

It is worth noting that short-term consumer loans accounted for the largest proportion outside housing loans, reaching 18.4.

As of the end of last year, the total liabilities of my country's household sector reached 55 trillion yuan. Based on this ratio, our personal short-term consumer loans reached 10 trillion yuan.

Among them, how many of these online loan platforms are using the trap of consumerism to make our young people fall into impulsive comparison consumption one after another.

In this impetuous and materialistic society.

It is actually quite difficult for us to insist on rational consumption.

I am not against entertainment, nor am I against consumption.

But I am firmly opposed to excessive entertainment and excessive consumption.