The Financial Case for Creativity

Ever since that cursed Shein brand trip last summer in which American influencers toured the company’s Guangzhou factories and marveled aloud at how “not-sweaty” the workers were, the center of the Venn diagram between sustainability and personal finance came into full focus. 

For most people, financial health is contingent upon managing consumption habits—producing more income than you’re exhausting. Often, this relationship looks a little like a waterwheel: The more water (income) you pour over it, the faster the wheel (consumption) turns. My first job enabled my biweekly Neiman Marcus Rumspringa, where three Louboutins in a trench coat always beckoned me in a fugue state to gawk at the clearance rack. 

High-end or cheap, we are absolutely swimming in shit. The discourse that followed the ill-fated fast fashion field trip usually focused on what you should be buying instead: brands that aren’t exploiting every step of their supply chain; fabrics that won’t immediately combust within 10 feet of an open flame. The instruction was usually: “Buy differently.” This was a step in the right direction, I think, but the even better solution to our financial, environmental, and existential woes might be: “Buy less.” 

Amanda Mull writes for the Atlantic, “Consumer choice is the animating logic of so much of American life, and buying things is how we are taught to assert our agency or express our political views or embrace our identities.” ‘Vote with your dollars,’ as it were. The data supports the idea that much of the spending on ultra-cheap platforms like Temu comes not from those who can’t afford to shop anywhere else, but those who can—roughly half of Temu’s American sales come from households earning more than $130,000, a data point that Mull says indicates we are nowhere near “peak consumption.” 

To understand how we got here, it’s important to remember that this is and has always been by meticulous design: The shift from “civilian” to “consumer” was an intentional invention at the turn of the 20th century in the US, thanks in part to Ultimate ThinkBoi Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays (RIP Freud, you would’ve loved Tweet threads). Bernays articulated a way out of the overproduction “crisis” that followed the Industrial Revolution. Businesses were getting antsy that they were making more stuff than people could realistically use—which meant demand had to be manufactured, too. Workers had to be educated in the “skill of consumption” to keep greasing the wheel. 

In 1928, Bernays published a book called Propaganda. It lionized the principles that would guide marketing departments the world over for the next hundred years: “Mass production is profitable only if its rhythm can be maintained,” he wrote, stating that a business “cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda… to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable.” 

Historian Daniel Boorstin traces Americans’ marketing susceptibility all the way back to the country’s colonial beginnings, noting that the first (surviving) crop of English colonists were those duped by their government’s promotion of abundant precious metals and jewels in Virginia, despite decades of evidence to the contrary—“a kind of natural selection…of those people who were willing to believe in advertising.”

You, of course, have personal agency to determine which of these implanted desires you’ll act upon—whether you fall prey to the $500 Dyson AirWrap (guilty) or the equally expensive and aesthetically dirty Golden Goose sneakers (could never be me)—but be careful about mistaking any of these desires as your own. As Tressie McMillan Cottom says, “I just like what I like!” is always a capitalist lie.  

In sustainability spaces, you’ll usually hear the same upshot: Overconsumption is what happens when humans consume more resources than we produce. The antidote for consumption is production. Could this be true from a psychological perspective, too? Could creativity—the act of creation itself—fill the soul hole we’re trying to cram with microtrends? 

Maybe exercising the equal, opposite, and deeply human impulse to express oneself can neutralize the artificial thirst for more: After all, the satiety I feel when tapping away at my little keyboard is longer lasting than the fleeting, hollow kind that follows acquisition. The dopamine that floods my brain after a session of badly plunking away at Chappell Roan piano covers cannot be replicated with one-click checkout.

History contains clues. Our present overconsumption might not just be the result of the industrial and technological revolutions divorcing Americans from the manufacturing and disposal of their goods, encouraging us to hoover up shipping containers of flammable crop tops before expelling them to Ghanaian beaches. What if it’s the separation of the creator from the creation itself that opens this crop top-shaped vacuum in the first place?

It’s not hard to imagine a preindustrial craftsman meticulously constructing a single pair of shoes (not the aesthetically dirty kind) to sell on the open market, using their own hands and beholding with their own eyes the outcome of their invention. Compare this to most work today—whether in a factory or server farm—in which you are profoundly disconnected from what you’re making (or worse, doing a “bullshit job” that could disappear tomorrow with no consequence). If you’re toiling in vain on one side of the equation, what’s left but to use your wages to seek meaning on the opposite side?

I realize I’m veering awfully close to nostalgizing typhoid and outhouses. But if you’re feeling dysregulated in your consumer behavior, maybe the solution is pursuing the worthy inverse: not restriction, but generation. Restoring the balance between these two impulses requires reprogramming a scrambled signal; regaining a sense of discernment that when you feel most compelled to go searching and acquiring, what you might actually need is to create.