Bored Panda got in touch with the mod team of the “Didn’t Know You Wanted” group to learn more and we discovered that there was some degree of background drama. “The short of it is that this sub was created by a deeply disturbed individual attempting to gain control over a large portion of the site's traffic and they've been kicked off the site hundreds of times. It's not the happy, fun, wacky story you were hoping for,” they shared with Bored Panda.
With a logo of a hand gripping a wad of cash, a homage to the often-repeated catchphrase “shut up and take my money” yelled by Fry on the animated show Futurama, the “Didn’t Know You Wanted” internet group has amassed over one million users. Folks come from across the internet to witness and explore innovations that some of us would truly throw handfuls of money at.
The core of the group is pretty simple, folks share products, items, and designs that do things we often didn’t even know existed or that we needed. Poor marketing, a saturated consumer market, who knows how many things have stopped us from finding the product that would make our lives easier. But good citizens of the internet have done their part to spread the word.
However, if we take a step backward, there is another question, namely, can and should problems be solved by just buying things? Both personally, and at scale, people attempting to solve their issues by buying things is often, at best, a temporary bandage. We are talking about, of course, consumerism.
Coined in 1955 by none other than the current VP of Ford, John Bugas, consumerism was originally a sort of definitional offshoot of capitalism. These days, it tends to be used in a pejorative way, indicating the tendency of people to medicate with shopping and the overwhelming plastic waste and pollution caused by the constant manufacture and shipping of things.
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Despite some of the optimism we often associate with the past, consumerism, as a term, got a more negative connotation pretty early on. By 1960, some magazines and journalists were using it to indicate just how susceptible people were to marketing and how happy they were to spend disposable income on things they didn’t really need.
Setting aside the psychological impact of trying “retail therapy” the truth is that consumerism isn’t just bad for our wallet and mental state, it’s downright horrible for the planet. Uruguayan American professor and writer Jorge Majfud wrote "Trying to reduce environmental pollution without reducing consumerism is like combating drug trafficking without reducing the drug addiction."
