Eden-Rose Baker is a journalism senior and a Mustang News opinion columnist. This article does not reflect the views of Mustang News.
I walk to the mailbox and see a package that I’ve long awaited; I ordered it weeks ago and am so excited to have finally received it. For me, this box is typically filled with clothes. I love looking good, getting compliments and receiving external validation. Finding clothes that other people think look good on me gives me the validation I desire.
This is a natural feeling; societies wouldn’t exist without humans validating each other. Before the Industrial Revolution, people worked together to keep their tribes alive, as history.com describes. When a tribe member supplied food or discovered tools, their mates validated them and saw them as essential to their survival. This validation was a tool that was pivotal in the evolution and survival of the species.
Today, status and validation aren’t determined by how well one can survive; it is determined by how much money people make. Professors from the University of Virginia and Stanford University found that wealthy people, no matter their qualifications, are more likely to have “higher social rankings” than their counterparts. The best way to prove to others that you are wealthy is to own a lot of stuff and have the ability to make purchases regularly. Humans’ demand for consumption, which ignores that we are only one species within an ecosystem, is abusing Earth’s resources.
TikTok Shop has been all over my For You Page ever since this summer, and this feature allows all creators to sell goods through the app. This has turned TikTok into a commercial where everyone is selling, and more people are buying random products, whether that be games, toys, clothes, makeup, etc.
TikTok has also helped enforce “microtrends,” which are trends that gain popularity quickly and cycle out quickly. Along with TikTok Shop, brands like Temu, Shein and Amazon Prime allow people to buy products from home inexpensively, allowing them to keep up with microtrends to show others that they can afford to spend frequently.
Since we aren’t foraging in the woods for berries, it is easy to forget that every good is a resource from the Earth. There have been no other species that have used up these resources as quickly. The Earth has had five mass extinctions, and we are currently in the sixth one called the Holocene Extinction — named after humans. Most mass extinctions have taken hundreds of years to come to fruition; because of human activity, this one is unfolding in decades’ time.
When it comes to finding solutions to this issue, I don’t think that there are any unless we completely restructure society’s view of wealth. A lot of people see shopping second hand as the end-all-be-all option when it’s only a bandaid to the larger issue. By the time a clothing item has been donated, odds are, large companies have already overused resources to make it. If we want to have a livable Earth, we need to completely change how we think and how we consume.
This means unraveling the thread that connects validation and wealth, which is a pretty tricky knot. Let’s not forget that there is power in the public, we are the consumers and if we can re-evaluate our connotations with consuming, we can make important steps toward a better society.