Desire Production: I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Want to Buy

The last year or so, I have been looking for the Perfect Jacket. I don’t have a specific product in mind, but a feeling I’m chasing. That undeniable thing that jumps out, clutches both of my shoulders and demands me to take it home. I’ve seen thousands of jackets, hundreds of them good, dozens of them tempting, but none of them perfect. After a while I began to wonder what was keeping me from buying, from finally reaching this grand payoff, and I realized the the barrier isn’t the products, it’s the desire for them.

I. Perfection is Dead. Perfection Remains Dead. And We Have Killed It. (maybe)

Perfect is a weird word in 2024. To me, it used to exist as more of an abstract concept than something tangible. Something you used as motivation, or strived towards. Things became perfect on your terms, the tangible version of the Platonic ideal you had in your head emerging over time. But recently it’s felt like Perfect has been cheapened to the point of not meaning much anymore. The life span and the gravity of Perfect are exponentially shrinking. Everything is perfect now, the perfect pants, the perfect bedsheets, the perfect bathroom scrubber. Perfection has been sanded down to a throwaway buzzword, a hubristic declaration of conquering the war on flaws after thousands of years. Aren’t you so lucky to be born right when we figured everything out? The issue with all this alleged perfection is, if it turns out to be true, what will that mean for our ability to gauge what makes it that way?

Something I ask myself a lot is, “What makes me want something?”. With how much I obsess over marketing and advertising, that question seems to be the heart and driving force of the whole equation. Simultaneously, there has never been more to want than there is right now. Good Taste is nice and cheap, with every clean cut expertly designed subtle-toned product you could ever ask for, seconds away. Beautiful pants, playful chairs, elegant shoes, there they all are in their tasteful glory. A LOT of them. So many of them in fact that the question I now have to ask is “What makes this different from the rest of them?”. If everything is Good Taste, then nothing is. New wave hipsterism of the late 10s and early 20s has laid the blueprint for this generation’s Tasteful Everyman. The well rounded consumption connoisseur that knows just enough about the “right stuff”. Food, music, clothes, art, literature, culture, they consume them in the cool way, not the weird way. An amalgamation of Good interests without any of the neurotic obsessive passion that leads to rough edges or wrinkles. The brands and products follow suit with things that jump right out of your pinterest pages and moodboards directly into your cart, decorated with enough Yankee caps, vintage Nikes, and tiny gold chains to fill a warehouse, all under the guise of their cheap, synthesized “Authenticity”. Chances are, you have the same screenshot collection. It creates an endless loop of homogenization, slowly sanding down the initial inspirations until all you’re left with is some simulacrum of elevated taste, a crocheted button up that you bought at the mall. Product turns to content, born from the same primordial mud of reference points, ending up in the same diluted pool, and recycled ad infinitum like airline oxygen.

II. The Age of Information

Scrolling the timeline is a lot like driving. Much more deserving of the Information Superhighway moniker than the early internet that name originally referred to. There’s simply just more information now than then. More total, more being presented to you, and most crucially, more to process and move on from instantly. We all drive on the same highways, albeit in different lanes, maybe different speeds, but in general the algorithmically generated routes remain constant. A barrage of data, opinions, recipes, arguments, vitriol, and all the rest must be digested in milliseconds. After a while, much like a real highway, your brain goes to autopilot. Eventually the deafening noise just becomes a dull hum in the background. This is the biggest hurdle advertisers and other grifters have had to attack this past decade. They only have one shot to peel your attention away from the abyss, so they have to make it count. To cope with dwindling razor thin attention spans and the endless road of the timeline, there have been two main strategies.

The first is the category most things fall into now, and generally what they’ve always been, traditional pitches for a product, pretty photos, and a thin veil of corporate honesty wrapping the package together. The issue with this tried and true strategy is the capacity of the platforms they exist on. Using the analogy of the highway, instead of one billboard every quarter mile for various types of products, now there are 15 billboards for competing, near identical products every 5 feet. A wriggling mass of taupe work pants and cafe lookbooks. The alternative strategy that some younger, more annoying types have put their money behind is of course the postmodern, “self-aware”, irony poisoned method. Flagrant, “edgy”, ignorant, whatever the form, the core values remain unchanged. Still competing for a moment of your attention, but purposely provoking or otherwise baiting the audience into looking. The billboards from before are now 15 every 5 feet, and half of them are trying to get you to crash your car into them. Your tailored algorithm picks up on what it thinks your taste is, and it will feed you every perversion and bastardization of that you can imagine until you resent yourself for liking it in the first place. It can feel suffocating. Speeding along on this endless plane, your brain needs a break from all the info, so it starts to take shortcuts. There’s no longer time left for reflection, only reaction. What does this make me feel in this exact moment? The thrashing waves of information continue endlessly and it all begins to blend together into a hulking grey composite of stimuli. Good. Ignore. Bad. Bad. Ignore. It feels like the screen starts to pick up the minute movements of your eyes, as if it knows how you’ll react to something before you do. An onslaught of hooks meant to pull at every section of your brain. The $800 pants ads start to look like the “Fuck MILFs in your area” ads which look like the “Get rich with Narbcoin!” ads. Attention becomes the primary commodity, completely devaluing the actual products in favor of the spectacle.

Context is everything when it comes to selling a product. The storytelling that the designer and advertiser instill is what makes you want to add something to your life. In our current age however, the buck has been passed to the consumer. It’s now up to you to do the heavy mental lifting and justify why you need something from the sea of detritus. Everything exists self-referentially, no actual context except for the post you see before and after. The ads and products displayed aren’t thinking about lasting long term, just the fraction of a second you interact with them. They lose their perceived value because they aren’t treated as if they have any by the companies. Additionally, consumers know the game more than ever now, and it’s not as fun when you’re aware of all the rules. An onslaught of influencers getting gluttonous amounts of free shit because they played the game “right” devalues the worth of the products. Why would I spend $200 on something when the brand treats it like nothing? The thing being sold shifts the commodity from the product itself to the secret hierarchy and backdoor channels to get it. “Buying into” the brand feels like a dead-end because it was shown by them to not be real. Celebrities and influencers are immediately assumed to have gotten everything for free for the explicit purpose of making the chumps that wait in line want it more. The Haves and the Have-Nots. In response, “thoughtful” consumers aren’t as married to retail as they once were. Big brands forcing people to create their own storytelling has lead to those potential customers applying it to whatever they want. At least they think they are.

III. Creating Your Own Perfection

I recently asked Twitter what the last thing that caught their eye and demanded them to buy it was. Unsurprisingly, the large majority of responses were for vintage things they found, either in a thrift store or online on aftermarket sites like ebay or Grailed. With the amount of work being put onto the consumer, it makes sense that they prefer to do that work for commodities they “found themselves”. Traditional retail can’t compete with all of the options available now, and they refuse to adapt. The in-person shopping experience post-COVID just isn’t the same. Stores change from carefully tailored experiences to just another supermarket. The entire experience feels cold and soulless. Get in, get your shit, pay up, and get the fuck out. Previously experiences like this weren’t the norm, and stores like Supreme felt novel for their apathetic theatrics. Similar to patronizing an old school New York institution like Peter Luger’s, the impersonal feel of it added to the mystique. It made you want to play along with the performance because it kept your suspension of disbelief. Now however, the curtain has been lifted everywhere. The dance of shopping has been stripped down to its bones, there’s nothing to make you want to buy in if you haven’t already.

That’s where the rise of thrift stores and reselling websites come in. The new consumer trusts their own taste more than the big brands and stores, so the battleground for attention shifts from physical to virtual. Now in order to get someone to want something, you need to work months in advance, priming them to suddenly “need” what you’re selling. Trends dictate everything now, keeping things constantly changing and moving at a terrifying pace, the antithesis of traditional brands and retail. They’re forced to be reactive, never proactive, much like the consumers themselves. Secondhand markets are able to move and thrive at this speed however, since they exist as middlemen within the trends themselves. As a trend begins to emerge, either organically or planted, the secondhand platforms feel more relatable because the commodities are thought to be coming from other similar minded consumers. Where this begins to change and what I think is a major factor of this growing lack of real desire, is the boom of Curated vintage and secondhand.

For every niche, there are things to buy. Countless signifiers to show you are “into” something. Before, these things required some hunting and genuine dedication to participate in. Sneakerheads needed to know which stores had which drops, how many pairs there will be, what time the line forms, whereas now its just are you in or are you out. Like a cult classic movie? Here are 50 different people selling it on a t-shirt. If you like vintage workwear, you have your choice of endless trucker hat clad men to barter with. Thrift stores are dictated by self taught expert buyers that sort through all the randomness to give you the best, trust them. The over-curation of everything removes the fun of the hunt and the satisfaction of putting in the work to accomplish something. It transforms what once felt like an anthropologic field study into a simulated Disneyland of “authenticity” Buying a ratty $60 tee isn’t as compelling if you don’t feel like you earned it. Being the fastest to enter your credit card info into the online clothes casino just doesn’t hit the same. Context still remains the most important part of this. Curators and sellers are now the ones in charge of creating context and narratives to get the customer to buy because they’re “trusted”. Vintage or Archive or Thrifted become brands instead of adjectives. Consumers don’t really want to do all the work to create a story for a product, so they get sold one by someone they trust and claim it’s what they actually wanted too. This is all impulse purchases seem to be now. A manifestation of months of being barraged by something until you start asking yourself “Do I want this?”. Synthetic short term desire.

IV. Well, How Did I Get Here?

It’s not surprising why feelings of desire have seemed muted considering any number of stressful factors at play in our world today. We are (in theory) growing more conscious of our consumption. What, where, how, and how much we buy are all put under our microscope due to growing economic and ecologic anxieties. Will this shirt end up in a landfill, will I need this $200 somewhere else, do I even have enough space for all this shit? Every purchase I make needs to count. With a looming recession, it’s not surprising people want to get the most bang for their buck. The issue is the current ecosystem of products treats longevity like a luxury, so more often than not what you’re left with is 60% of the satisfaction you wanted. The euphoria, the excitement, the desire all dulled into an anticlimax. It wasn’t always like this however. I still remember a recent time when there was so much tangible kinetic energy in the air, when it felt like the rules were paused and experimentation was the meta. That time was 2020.

The opening year of the pandemic was as close to peering into an alternate reality as you could get. The world felt seconds away from ending at any moment, and people quickly reverted to their rawest forms, for better and oftentimes for much worse. Throughout all of this uncertainty, there was an overwhelming swell of attention and importance being attributed to community. In 2024 it’s hard to hear that word without immediately associating it with hollow brand statements and PR rollouts, but during that absurd year, it really felt like we were learning lessons that would stick. People sought out new, small designers and brands to support, and we started to see what indie buying power could really do. Purchases felt thoughtful and intentional, and it led to several underground movements becoming real. We saw the power of what looking out for each other could do, excuse the rose tinted lenses for a second.

But that ended. Now we’re here. Same uncertainties, same anxieties about the world, but something is different. Our diet “summer of love” was evicted and replaced with the gleaming monolith of big business just like usual. Somewhere along the line of standing up to the big guys, letting them know they needed us more than we needed them, demanding better, they won again. The issue is they still have their 2019 playbook. Across industries companies are floundering, reporting stagnation and losses, and they’ll try just about anything except fucking listening. They have no confidence in the consumer or even the future, and the average buyer reflects that. Nostalgia has begun to saturate into and dominate every aspect of culture on both the consumer and producer side because we’re all chasing this imaginary idea of a world that never actually existed. The Good Old Days when nobody had any worries and everyone dressed well and that one brand was still cool. Brands have started to capitalize on tapping that sweet nostalgia nerve out of sheer necessity, selling clothes made to look “Vintage” or “The Right Way”, pulling the tasteful taupe and forest green blanket over us as we wax poetic about how good things used to be.

V. So What Now?

Humans are narrative beings. We can’t help but attach a story to our own collective lives. The nostalgia cycle as it is now is unhealthy and unsustainable because it creates a pacifying feedback loop that will only deteriorate with no new information. We keep revisiting the past because we’re all scared of the future (for valid reasons), but at a certain point we all have the desire to become something new. We keep over-consuming because we keep hoping that the next purchase will be the thing to make everything ok. The dopamine begins to wear off, and we repeat the cycle again. No closure on the past, but already halfway towards the Next Big Thing.

Philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes rituals as “Temporal Technologies”, the ways we occupy and decorate time the same way we do space. Looking at it from that perspective, a lot start to make sense. Maybe the solution to all this fatigue is to start investing more time into desiring and buying something. Maybe we can gain more satisfaction from the chase or hunt of a purchase than the “finish line” of owning it. A new pair of pants can make you feel like a new person, maybe that comes from the accomplishment of knowing you earned that New You. The relief of finally closing that Safari tab you’ve had open and periodically revisited on your phone for months.

I think the answer is to look inward. Take stock of what makes you really want something, not just what might feel good in the moment. It requires listening to and trusting yourself, which seems more and more frightening for the unconscious consumer by the day. Maybe the thing you really want isn’t what’s being presented to you. Maybe you haven’t even considered it yet. Going back to that original question of what makes something perfect, the inescapable answer will always be the story. With brands and producers getting lazier, you can’t trust them to give you that story anymore, you have to seek it out yourself. Since they passed the work to you, work for yourself. Squeeze as much narrative, thought, connection, and desire out of the journey of wanting something as you can. Find the joy in doing research, in breaking out of the comfort zone feedback loops, or ascribing personal meaning to something that deserves it. You decide what makes something perfect, so don’t accept anything less than that.

I’m still looking for the perfect jacket.