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Once you have learned all the options, you make a value judgment.
Your research is new knowledge, and you have to put knowledge to use.
Clever marketing wraps the consumer in minor choice differentiations. Each small decision is a small reflection of you (your taste and values): you shape your identity by choice, and your agency is completed through action.
The consumerist trap is to entangle your shaping of self with commodity selection.
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Humans can now only relate to others as objects, as commodities: the human relation is now a product-driven object-obsessed interaction. Worse, how you relate to others is how you relate to yourself.
The seduction is easy: I love working with tools whose smooth functioning moves into a frictionless joy of goal achievement. I am a product fetishist, producing myself as a proximate object for consumption.
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The root meaning of “auto” is self or spontaneous. Yet the automobile is not self-moving, autonomy is not self-will (since we are externally shared and motivated), and automatic always requires intervention.
“Auto” is more of a matter of degree. We hand over control to processes that promise freedom, yet more often cleverly disguise long-distance reliance (oil, software, labor, or ideology), which automates us in trade for a “convenience.”
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Everything I complain about now, I wished to have at some point. The maintenance of all my fulfilled desires is a tiresome chore.
Yet, if I wish away my responsibilities and toys, that dream too will be granted.
More appropriately, I should remember to be thankful rather than spiteful.
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"He who dies with the most toys wins" is a child-like sentiment, and yet there is comfort in the physical items that surround us. They offer a concrete means to validate our place in the world, which delivers tangible stability.
When do we graduate from childhood’s external value measures to the maturation of internal worth? Hopefully, before we die.
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Convenience becomes routine. The comfort of convenience robs us of the space and opportunity, as well as the time, to engage with the world.
If you always drive, decide to walk. If you only go outside during the daylight, take a walk at 3 AM.
The way the world operates outside of your norm is surreal, and your attention will be engaged.
Introduce some micro-challenges by taking the third or fourth option, the more uncomfortable option.
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Voraciously filling your brain produces little, and actually blocks productivity and conversion to reality.
Solution: non-identify. Pull back and ask yourself what you will be happy you did tomorrow.
