{"id":461,"date":"2024-07-22T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-07-22T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/moneywithkatie.com\/the-financial-case-for-creativity\/"},"modified":"2025-09-03T18:35:40","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T18:35:40","slug":"the-financial-case-for-creativity","status":"publish","type":"essays","link":"https:\/\/moneywithkatie.com\/essays\/the-financial-case-for-creativity\/","title":{"rendered":"The Financial Case for Creativity"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Ever since that cursed Shein brand trip<\/span><\/a> last summer in which American influencers toured the company\u2019s Guangzhou factories and marveled aloud at how \u201cnot-sweaty\u201d the workers were, the center of the Venn diagram between sustainability and personal finance came into full focus. <\/p>\n

For most people, financial health is contingent upon managing consumption habits\u2014producing more income than you\u2019re 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. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\n \u201c<\/span>The even better solution to our financial, environmental, and existential woes might be: \u2018Buy less.\u2019\u201d<\/span>\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n
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High-end or cheap, we are absolutely swimming<\/em> 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\u2019t exploiting every<\/em> step of their supply chain; fabrics that won\u2019t immediately combust within 10 feet of an open flame. The instruction was usually: \u201cBuy differently.\u201d This was a step in the right direction, I think, but the even better solution to our financial, environmental, and existential woes might be: \u201cBuy less<\/em>.\u201d <\/p>\n

Amanda Mull writes for the <\/span><\/a>Atlantic<\/em><\/span><\/a>, \u201cConsumer 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.<\/strong>\u201d \u2018Vote with your dollars,\u2019 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\u2019t afford to shop anywhere else, but those who can\u2014roughly half of Temu\u2019s American sales come from households earning more than $130,000, a data point that Mull says indicates we are nowhere near \u201cpeak consumption.\u201d <\/p>\n

To understand how we got here, it\u2019s important to remember that this is and has always been by meticulous design: The shift from \u201ccivilian\u201d to \u201cconsumer\u201d was an intentional invention at the turn of the 20th century in the US, thanks in part to Ultimate ThinkBoi Sigmund Freud\u2019s nephew, Edward Bernays (RIP Freud, you would\u2019ve loved Tweet threads). Bernays articulated a way out of the overproduction \u201ccrisis\u201d that followed the Industrial Revolution. Businesses were getting antsy that they were making more stuff than people could realistically use\u2014which meant demand<\/em> had to be manufactured, too. Workers had to be educated in the \u201cskill of consumption\u201d to keep greasing the wheel. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\n \u201c<\/span>Businesses were getting antsy that they were making more stuff than people could realistically use\u2014which meant demand had to be manufactured, too.\u201d<\/span>\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n
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In 1928, Bernays published a book<\/span><\/a> called Propaganda<\/em>. It lionized the principles that would guide marketing departments the world over for the next hundred years: \u201cMass production is profitable only if its rhythm can be maintained,\u201d he wrote, stating that a business \u201ccannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda\u2026 to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable.\u201d <\/p>\n

Historian Daniel Boorstin traces Americans\u2019 marketing susceptibility<\/span><\/a> all the way back to the country\u2019s colonial beginnings, noting that the first (surviving) crop of English colonists were those duped by their government\u2019s promotion of abundant precious metals and jewels in Virginia, despite decades of evidence to the contrary\u2014\u201ca kind of natural selection\u2026of those people who were willing to believe in advertising.\u201d<\/p>\n

You, of course, have personal agency to determine which of these implanted desires you\u2019ll act upon\u2014whether you fall prey to the $500 Dyson AirWrap (guilty) or the equally expensive and aesthetically dirty Golden Goose sneakers (could never be me)\u2014but be careful about mistaking any<\/em> of these desires as your own. As Tressie McMillan Cottom says<\/span><\/a>, \u201cI just like what I like!\u201d is always a capitalist lie.  <\/p>\n

In sustainability spaces, you\u2019ll 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?<\/strong> Could creativity\u2014the act of creation itself<\/em>\u2014fill the soul hole we\u2019re trying to cram with microtrends? <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\n \u201c<\/span>Could creativity\u2014the act of creation itself\u2014fill the soul hole we\u2019re trying to cram with microtrends?\u201d<\/span>\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n
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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.<\/p>\n

History contains clues. Our present overconsumption might not just<\/em> 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<\/span><\/a>. What if it\u2019s the separation of the creator from the creation itself<\/em> that opens this crop top-shaped vacuum in the first place?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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\u2014whether in a factory or server farm\u2014in which you are profoundly dis<\/em>connected from what you\u2019re making (or worse, doing a \u201cbullshit job<\/span><\/a>\u201d that could disappear tomorrow with no consequence). If you\u2019re toiling in vain on one side of the equation, what\u2019s left but to use your wages to seek meaning on the opposite side?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\n \u201c<\/span>Maybe the solution is pursuing the worthy inverse: not restriction, but generation.\u201d<\/span>\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n
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I realize I\u2019m veering awfully close to nostalgizing typhoid and outhouses. But if you\u2019re feeling dysregulated in your consumer behavior, maybe the solution is pursuing the worthy inverse: not restriction, but generation<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ever since that cursed Shein brand trip last summer in which American influencers toured the company\u2019s Guangzhou factories and marveled aloud at how \u201cnot-sweaty\u201d 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\u2014producing more income […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":2500,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-461","essays","type-essays","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Financial Case for Creativity - Money with Katie<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/moneywithkatie.com\/essays\/the-financial-case-for-creativity\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Financial Case for Creativity - 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