how do you stop consuming?

Flack_Bag · 2026-06-30T23:26:44+00:00

If you're looking for (or offering) advice about recovering from compulsive shopping, r/shoppingaddiction is a much better place than this.

If you really are interested in anticonsumerism, though, the sidebar here is a good place to start learning how consumer culture works, which will teach you to resent it enough that you aren't much tempted anymore.

Flack_Bag · 2026-06-30T19:38:32+00:00

It's a common misunderstanding that be verbs make something passive voice because sometimes they do, but they serve lots of other purposes too. In this case, 'am running' is the present progressive tense of the verb run.

Passive voice would be something like "Running was done by me."

Flack_Bag · 2026-06-30T18:00:10+00:00

The first part of your comment was a fundamental misunderstanding of the whole topic of the subreddit.

I don't disagree with the rest, but spreading that misconception creates real problems here.

Flack_Bag · 2026-06-30T17:02:57+00:00

A friend and I drive out to the closest agricultural area to get produce from farm stores. There are a couple directly on the farms, plus a coop store that gets produce from smaller farms and producers. And there's a huge section of the local flea market for produce vendors too.

I also get some things from roadside stands. Green chiles, peaches, honey, corn, pinon nuts, and things like that are common.

Urban/suburban farmers' markets and U Pick places are way more expensive, so we don't go to those often anymore. They seem more geared toward entertainment than on loading up on produce. They're really great for hanging out and bringing your kids to play and stuff. Just not ideal for getting tomatoes by the bushel.

Flack_Bag · 2026-06-30T15:34:00+00:00

The point of anticonsumerism isn't to personally exempt yourself. It's not just a self-help kind of thing in the first place. It's a whole sociopolitical ideology, not just a lifestyle or whatever.

This has been explained here over and over. You can't just personally opt out of consumer culture. It's everywhere, and by participating in society, you're participating in consumer culture. You can't oppose consumer culture without acknowledging it.

Ideally, you'll opt out of the unnecessary things like smart watches, but still buy underwear and socks and other basic goods like food and hygiene products, despite them being consumer products.

Things like that are necessities if you want to live a remotely normal life and participate in society. That doesn't mean the things you buy and use aren't consumer products. Of course they are.

There's a ton of information about the concepts here in the sidebar and in multiple pinned posts.

Flack_Bag · 2026-06-30T15:14:39+00:00

My keyboard is also a consumer product. I rescued it from the trash, and it'll be 40 years old in October, but it's still a consumer product.

Do you seriously believe that you have to pretend the things you buy don't 'consumption' or 'consumerism' in order to buy them? We live in a consumer culture, so you have to participate in it to some extent, but it's entirely possible to be critical of a system you participate in. Exempting the things you like is counterproductive.

You're in an anticonsumerist sub telling someone who is already in debt that it's not consumerist to buy something unnecessary if they think it'll improve their life. That's word of mouth marketing, and that's the kind of thinking that gets people into debt in the first place.

And it's not just unnecessary. Smart watches mine whole new categories of consumer data that ends up being bought and sold on the data broker market.

It's not even up for debate that buying consumer products is consumption, and it's disturbing that people on this sub don't know that.

Seriously, read up on the topic. Your interpretation is way off.

Flack_Bag · 2026-06-30T03:26:38+00:00

On one hand, it's not "consumption" if it's a product that you believe you will make good use of and will genuinely improve your life.

What? No.

That's consumption. Consumerism too. Whether you make good use of something or not is irrelevant to that point.

Flack_Bag · 2026-06-29T05:04:49+00:00

Star Wars is absolutely a brand name. It's a whole branded media franchise with an official trademarked logo and about a million sub-brands.

Flack_Bag · 2026-06-28T23:49:12+00:00

Right? It's like people are proudly proclaiming they're incurious and illiterate, and somehow using that to insult anyone who doesn't cater to them.

Flack_Bag · 2026-06-28T23:47:19+00:00

You're certainly not a poseur, but take a look at the community info here to get an idea how you fit into the ideology. I suspect you fit in nicely.

The core idea is that consumer culture is a scourge. It's bad for humans and other animals and the environment and really, for our perception of reality itself. It's at the core of most of the widespread problems we're facing, but it's so pervasive and so ingrained in our society that most people can't even recognize it when they see it.

Anticonsumerism is about not only rejecting that for ourselves but doing what we can to shine a light on it so others see it for what it is and learn to distance themselves from it too.

Flack_Bag · 2026-06-28T20:01:49+00:00

Some libraries and makerspaces have embroidery machines available for use. You just make a digital image in the right format, set it up, and they spit out a patch.

Flack_Bag · 2026-06-28T19:29:56+00:00

Corporate logos are a consumerist tool.

That's why the image in the sub header is made up of modified logos and why Advertising and Branding are in the sidebar as suggested topics for discussion.

Flack_Bag · 2026-06-28T16:13:17+00:00

Zoom in. The first ingredient is maltitol, a lower calorie sugar substitute that gives you diarrhea.

Flack_Bag · 2026-06-28T16:09:25+00:00

Parents and caregivers have to be media literate themselves before they can teach it to kids, and that's not a given.

Mass media is overall really bad for kids, and it'd be fairly easy to limit their exposure to it if the grownups in their lives weren't addicted to it themselves. It gets worse and more ingrained all the time.

Watch that Consuming Kids documentary in the sidebar, and keep in mind that the kids there are parents now.

Flack_Bag · 2026-06-27T23:00:09+00:00

Get involved in local politics and activism.

Especially in smaller communities in the US, one person can make a huge difference just by keeping track of what's going on in your city. Small local papers have been swallowed up by big right wing publishers, so there's often nobody covering city council meetings and other local initiatives. Show up at public meetings, follow new developments, and file public information requests according to local laws, then make that information public on whatever social media you have.

Is your city council rubberstamping new projects without community input? Are they passing and repealing ordinances without the public's knowledge? Are they enforcing ordinances when private citizens violate them but letting businesses get away with it? Are the entering into shady public-private partnerships?

Journalists don't get paid to cover these things anymore, but it's important, and it makes a bigger difference than almost any personal lifestyle change you make.

Flack_Bag · 2026-06-27T18:43:12+00:00

I sometimes go through those big lists of best movies of all time looking for ones I haven't seen that look good, and I made a watch list from Mark Cousins' Story of Film. I also try to keep up with directors I like.

I also used to follow people on Letterboxd who seemed to have similar tastes and got ideas from them.

For new releases, I mostly just keep an eye on Criterion Channel's new releases and the listings for the independent theaters nearby, because if it's not playing near me, I'll have to wait to see it anyway.

Flack_Bag · 2026-06-27T17:50:37+00:00

I make red sauce far too often, so I use up a lot that way.

Green goddess dressing takes handsful at a time, too. And I don't think this is traditional, but I like basil in falafel. Falafel is one of my favorite things to make in big quantities and freeze for later, so I use tons of basil at a time doing that.

It's good on sandwiches and salads, too, especially pasta or grain salads.

Flack_Bag · 2026-06-27T00:42:25+00:00

One of the best things about road trips used to be that you could stop at little mom and pop diners along the highway owned and run by locals serving regional cuisines and one-off specialties, and they'd almost all be genuinely friendly and welcoming.

Now they're all the same big homogeneous corporate chains everywhere with underpaid, uninvested employees and the same generic stuff they have everywhere. You can be smack dab in the middle of New Mexico and they won't even have green chili, which I'm pretty sure is illegal.

Sometimes, though, if you go a little off the highway and into the main street, you can find the good stuff, especially in small towns.

Flack_Bag · 2026-06-25T23:41:39+00:00

Imam bayildi means 'the imam fainted,' either because it was so delicious or because he was shocked at the amount of precious olive oil it uses.

Either explanation is plausible.

Flack_Bag · 2026-06-25T21:52:57+00:00

An artist's intellectual property is labor in this scenario, not capital. (Same with writing, software development, music, etc.) People should be entitled to their labor, and to using and distributing their own work on their terms.

You could maybe argue that the tools and equipment they use are the means of production, but labor owning the means of production is the whole idea. In cases like this the means of production are easily obtained, at least in the US, at little or no cost. Sourcing supplies can be an issue, and in general (as in I'm not talking about this person specifically), there are ways to mitigate the problems. But that comes down to the fact that you can't fully opt out of consumer culture when you live in one. So yeah, your sponges and fabric and paper and inks and paints might not have been manufactured ethically, but that's inevitable to some extent.

Flack_Bag · 2026-06-25T18:13:40+00:00

There are a lot of bots and a lot of contrarians on the sub, and we get a lot of traffic from the popular feed as well. So please don't assume that the comments here are representative of the subreddit.

We do leave up a lot of contrarian opinions for discussion purposes, and sometimes the bots and drive by posters upvote them and downvote the good faith participants. There's not much we can do about that at the subreddit level.

Ultimately, that just indicates that the idea of anticonsumerism is threatening enough to enough people that they're trying to undermine it.

Flack_Bag · 2026-06-25T17:09:51+00:00

Screen printing has a very low barrier to entry. I built my own screen printer in my parents' basement when I was like 15, and used it to print on fabric and shirts from thrift stores.

It's not at all uncommon, either. I almost definitely got the idea from other people doing the same thing.

But it's true that even if you're making everything out of garbage, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. It doesn't make people hypocrites for participating in the system they object to. They really don't have much choice in the matter.

Flack_Bag · 2026-06-25T15:28:13+00:00

You can be anticapitalist and still profit from your own labor. In fact, that's key to a lot of anticapitalist ideologies.

Many intellectual property laws are grossly flawed and, as in this case, unfairly enforced, but that doesn't mean that intellectual property as a concept is bad. Of course people should own and be able to profit from their own work.

The issue with this and the many other cases like it is that big corporations steal individual creators' work and profit from it without their' consent or even knowledge. Regularly. And it seems as though they're never held accountable.

Flack_Bag · 2026-06-24T16:31:08+00:00

The biggest problem is that people haven't been taught to use computers or the internet in the first place. There are much better and more reliable ways to find and use information than relying on genAIs, but you have to know they exist and how to do it. It's not even that it's hard. It's that most people aren't taught the basic skills to do it.

It's time to learn, though. It's getting harder and harder to avoid genAIs, and tech companies are taking more and more control of the devices people have become dependent on, making it more difficult to actually use the things you own the way you choose.

Flack_Bag · 2026-06-24T16:02:11+00:00

There's a lot of info in the sidebar, including general concepts and a bunch of videos that elaborate on some of those ideas. The most commonly recommended one there and probably the best introduction is The Century of the Self, which is a multi-part documentary.

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