i hope my anticapitalist friends don't hate me too much for my brazen materialistic indulgences
@typhlosion i mean. as far as i understand, anticapitalism doesn't (and really… shouldn't) mean monastic asceticism. you're allowed to do self-care, even if that self-care involves, like. trashy soda or coffee or getting yourself a new $clothing because yours are fraying
@indi @starryblush ehh i guess i'm just worried about being like. part of the problem and/or not principled enough to hang out with the cool kids just because i often just... buy things because i want them rather than explicitly for the sake of self-care
i mean i could chalk arbitrary desired purchases up to self-care but then where's the line
@typhlosion @starryblush I think a good part of "the line" is that you just keep thinking about that :)
@starryblush @typhlosion (But as someone who is very good at spinning into self-referential anxiety, I know that can be tricky too. c.c)
@typhlosion @indi i mean. you get to set that line for yourself, through experimentation and introspection.
and you're allowed to get things for yourself, as a positive statement of "i value, and so does my happiness"
@starryblush @indi i guess it ties back to what i said a while ago, which is that giving everything a price in money is inherently reductive
i like things cos i like *the things*, not their monetary value - liking and wanting things feels different from liking and wanting money because things are useful for lots of purposes other than acquiring more things, whereas money is only good for the latter (and also for screwing over not-moneyed people)
@indi @starryblush ultimately it's the *other* thing i said a while ago - what good is wealth if not to spend? if you're just sitting on more than a small amount of it then it feels like you've got your priorities wrong
man idk, i'm just thinking on my feet here
@typhlosion @starryblush Yeah one of the most baffling things to me about all the income inequality stuff is like "what the fuck are they DOING with all that money?" Because it doe sometimes feel like folks are just treating it as a high-score game.
@indi @starryblush precisely! i think the best way to think about money is that it's just a means rather than an end in and of itself - if you treat it as an end then *that's* where you start to get a lot of the really predatory bullshit, cos you're just sitting on money that someone else could be *using to get stuff they need*
i have more nuanced thoughts about this but this margin doesn't have space enough to contain them
@typhlosion One thing that helps in all this kind of thought is to remember that "capitalism", as actually defined by economists, isn't "owning stuff", it's "owning stuff for the sake of making profits" ;)
@indi i guess my thought is that some of that is okay as long as you're, like, actually letting those profits circulate rather than hoarding them
making profit in the frame of "wanting to more easily obtain goods and services" is fine because how else would you do it? and that still lets the money go to other people who will then ostensibly use it for their own things. but using money as an amoral leaderboard is wrongheaded and, of course, exactly what's happening
@starryblush @typhlosion Yeah, this is the "positive" side of "no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism" I suppose; we all do what we need to to keep on keeping on, just try to do your best with it.