Thoughts on Consuming and Making

Consumers are N=1 Makers

Don’t be a consumer, it’s doesn’t lead to a life worth living.

We hear all the time about the strength of the American Consumer, or the consumer economy, but what actually is a consumer? Not in the obvious “a consumer consumes” sense - a consumer is someone who buys things of course, but how we label our economy as driven by consumers. When you start looking, you can find lots of wannabe-VC-god-king dichotomies of people in the world, but the Consumer vs. Creator dichotomy is real - there are people who make things: products, companies, content, and then there are people who buy them. The buyers vastly outnumber the sellers, which is how you get an economic pyramid that concentrates wealth in the hands of a few individuals. Take a second to think of all the things you buy and consume: services, products, food, media. Do you make any of these?

From what I’ve seen, most people “make” only one thing - they do their job for their employer, “making” economic value. They then consume a salary for that work which they funnel into more consumption of all the stuff I described above. For every influencer that has some unbelievably rich 5-9 after they’re 9-5, most people just go to work, maybe exercise, then watch TikTok / Netflix / media, then go to bed. The whole day they consume food and media and services, and they only put 1 thing into the world.

The Consumer is what capitalism pushes us to be, consumers of everything around us up to and beyond how much money we have, consuming experiences and new restaurants and taking the same trips that we’ve seen online to the same places with the same photos. I speak from personal experience, there is a hollowness to being a Consumer - it’s akin to gluttony or hedonism, you just have to fill your role, consume, and then die.

So my advice is to go N > 1. What does that mean? It means rewiring your brain and daily routines. Our brains make it incredibly easy to fall into a pattern of joy through consumption - pulling up TikTok for 30 minutes leads to a nice dopamine wave, but you get nothing from it in the end. Writing an essay (like this one) that will probably be bad and no one will ever read is hard and doesn’t make you happy most of the time, but you made a thing, and you can point at it and say “I made a thing”. Making a thing whether it’s art or music or software or a meal worth sharing is the whole point. That probably means you’ll be a less traditionally "fun" person because you’ll start slipping on contacts and social media references, but you have to make choices, and after a median lifetime of consuming, you want to drastically over-correct.