Back in 2017, I wrote an article about porn. I was reminded of this article today by 
It is just where my mind went.
Which is strange since we were talking about poverty.
If you read the article linked above, it was about success porn, but what brought it to mind was this part of the comment from
I bloody hate the ads and the magazine articles about 'cooking on a budget' - ffs. Like it's a war and it's our responsibility to soldier on with handy home hints, and if we are starving, well, we should just budget better, even though THEY have told us that happiness means the bigger house, and the developer squeezes even bigger ones onto even smaller blocks that cost more yada yada yada.
The "Own nothing and be happy" mentality is in full swing, and it is being pushed by forcing people into increasing economic hardship, while the corporations are making increasing profits. It is a scam created to keep the abusive financial system spinning for a few more rounds, so that all of the global resources are in the hands of the few. When we don't own for ourselves, when we can't provide for ourselves, we have to rely on others, and what that means is - someone else chooses how we live, or we die.
Poverty Porn is the new Success Porn
"Do with less" is a good approach to life in many ways, but this is not what this is about. This is marketing for profit and has no intention to make our lives better. It isn't a choice that someone makes, it is forced by engineered circumstances that have been designed to maximise profits. Right now, since the wealth gap is so incredibly large, the only way to squeeze more profits out of people, is to force them to do with less, so that they will be able to keep buying more. That seems like a crazy statement, but it is not - it is part of the debt cycle and goes hand in hand with taking on more debt in order to keep purchasing, and then reducing expenses to keep purchasing lower and lower quality and amounts.
For instance, I mentioned almost a week ago in an article about the tariffs forcing an increase in coffee prices in the US, since all of it is imported. And then BBC wrote an article yesterday about the same thing. However, coffee prices have been increasing already for a while, and it has been part of the conversation for a year or more in Finland, as Finns are supposedly the largest per capita consumer of coffee in the world. Bad coffee - but coffee. One quote from the BBC article caught my attention.
"Most customers just get plain coffee, instead of adding syrups and milks. The prices on the menu have gone up by 25% and people are now buying smaller coffees."
People haven't stopped buying coffee, they are just taking the trimmings off and buying smaller cups. But, they are paying the same amount. It is a "less for more" position that is being forced upon us by government and corporation alike, where governments are reducing services for people, and corporations are reducing product offerings - but prices keep increasing, because people keep on demanding, keep on consuming - even though they are not getting near what they would have got earlier.
"Shrinkflation" of all things consumable.
This isn't to make us happier, this isn't for environmental considerations, this is singularly for an increase in profits for corporations and their investors. And it is supported by Poverty Porn where for the last decade there have been shows coming out about the lives of the poor, and social media is now filling with "povpo" (my own term) where "savings hacks" for everything from shopping to cooking, to home workout tips and more, are being peddled. They might "help" someone save, but they don't help the situation, they make it worse.
They make it worse by helping people accept less and less in return for their time, effort and money, in the same way that porn and Tinder help people accept less from their relationships, turning everything transactional and short-term, rather than developing and evolving together.
Learning to live with less doesn't automatically mean living a better quality of life, it just means that quality of life is continually reduced until survival is the only thing left. We are going backwards. And when survival is the only purpose left, society falls apart, as violence increases, communities fail, groups and individuals suffer. And these conditions are being systematically designed in the pursuit of more profit.
Don't buy into it.
It isn't easier to live with nothing for most people, but nothing is where most are headed, because we as a society keeping buying into the idea of reducing ourselves in return for a continually lowering quality of luxury. We are choosing to be renters rather than owners, reliant rather than self-reliant.
The purveyors of porn don't care about you, they aren't trying to make your life better, your relationships better, your opportunities better. they are just taking advantage of our insecurities, our inabilities, our unavailabilities to sell us an inferior substitute as a replacement for the real thing. One thing is for certain though....
! [NSFW]
We are all getting fucked.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]