The Perpetual Consumer Wheel

Quest for Quality

Quality of life, of services, of devices, of cars, of homes, of food, of medicine... Quality! Always seeking the best in things. There is no shame in wanting quality, it's a requirement for success. Businesses are very well aware of that, it's a good thing for healthy competition. If they can't deliver quality, then someone else will, and that's where the consumer's money will go. But quality is a costly enterprise, it takes time and energy to research new and better goods. Most importantly, the big bet if on the human nature to buy those improved goods, otherwise there're no point in pursuing quality. It boils down to basic a neural response: pleasure. The culprit: dopamine. Sugar and fat for example are powerful inducers of dopamine release. Guess what are the main ingredients in those yummy fast foods? Sugar and fat (with a touch of salt of course to enhance the taste).

Addiction to Quality

Let's consider movies for example. Since the advent of film making over a century ago, people enjoyed going to the cinema to marvel at that big screen with those impressive 24 frames per second scrolling in front of them. When TV became mainstream in the 50's, everything changed. Now, every household could have its own mini cinema in their living room. Some superstitious humans feared TV because they thought it had the devil inside. Eventually they caught up with the technology and embraced it like the rest. At that point, things were still fairly cheap, the cost of the TV device was sufficient to catch those radio waves freely flying through the air. The true TV addictive revolution came with the invention of the VCR! People could record anything audio-visual, share it, rent it, sell it. That was the the sparking point for the next generations. It became possible to own a piece of those movies they would see in the cinemas, to re-watch over and over at home. And that's not all... the Dee Vee Dee came along, delivering another revolution in quality and delivering a better picture, no wear and tear, like the video tape had. What to do? Upgrade all those movies on VHS to DVD. Then ditch those tapes into oblivion. What next? DVD not good enough? Of course not, Blu-ray is here, smashing the quality barrier once again with staggering HD resolution and higher bitrate of audio and sound. That Hi-Fi home theater is starting to look and sound awesome. Don't get too excited, because 1080p ain't enough anymore, nano-technology is still kicking it and now HD is slowly morphing into Ultra HD, delivering 4x more pixels than 1080p. Crisper image and finer details await you.

What's the Cost?

Considering my lifetime so far:

Upgrade that little CRT TV to buy a bigger CRT TV
Get a VCR
Buy (at least) 1 movie on VHS
Buy a DVD player
Re-buy that movie on DVD
Ditch the old CRT and get a new HDTV
Finally buy a Blu-ray player (had to wait a few years for prices to makes sense!)
Re-buy the same movie on Blu-ray
Get a 4K HDTV (wait another few years for prices to makes sense!)
Buy a UHD Blu-ray player
Re-buy the movie again on 4K UHD Blu-ray

That's a lot of device upgrades and movie re-buys. Multiply those movies we love and the cost gets pretty high, just to keep up with technology and supply more candy for the eyes.

Irresistible Desire for More

We are an addictive species (blame it on dopamine), we yearn for better and more. Along with curiosity, it's been our evolutionary drive, without it, we would still be stuck in the caverns. That addiction has been beneficial to better our lives and improve our comfort (thank you dopamine), however it's a costly process. We constantly need to work for that paycheck in order to pay for those nifty material gadgets. Instead of using objects to our service, we have become enslaved to them. As eloquently put by Tyler Durden:

Feeling like a Hamster

So in the end, we're prisoners of this perpetual consumer wheel, where we are somehow forced to keep upgrading our hardware and gadgets in order to satisfy our lust. It's not easy to break this cycle of continuous invention, creation, destruction and recycling of our beloved objects.