When we're still wearing short sleeves and there are still days left until the chestnut festival, and we're even remembering some of the moments from the summer holidays, the streets are doing their thing and are already warning you that Christmas is coming. The lights They've been put back in their place. They're off, but fully visible during the day, and they wish you Happy Holidays as if it were no big deal. They're not so subtly notifying you that you should start buying gifts if you don't want what usually happens to you every year to happen to you. Because you'll buy, you'll buy. With all the contradictions. And this thing about the lights may have a practical, organizational explanation. Which it certainly does. But it's also true that we've been going too far for a while now, and consumption has become a legal drug that no one can stop.
The social organizations that manage what we leave in used clothing containers warn that they are collapsedOn the one hand, due to their own lack of resources, but on the other, due to the excess of bags piling up inside and outside the containers. The trend of low-quality clothing, that ultra-fast fashion designed for a very short time, generates excess production, excess purchasing, and a lack of the possibility of reusing, repurchasing, or regenerating it. They demand urgent commitments from industry, administrations, and consumers to reverse a situation that is overwhelming them and that, like hanging Christmas lights in early October, makes no sense. Consumption above all. Production above all. Excess above all. Poverty, too.
It's not just clothing. In supermarkets, there is an excess of products, and especially packaging, piling up in the yellow recycling bags. Other containers that also can't keep up, considering the number of times we find them overflowing. It has been achieved, yes, that people are increasingly carrying their own bags when they go shopping, and plastic bags are becoming less common. But cloth bags have also been manufactured beyond our means, and now they're another product that accumulates in homes, like thermoses or canteens or other types of containers to avoid carrying a plastic bottle, of which there is an absolutely huge and unnecessary range of models. There are stores that offer so many products, and so mixed together—shampoo alongside candy, cell phone cables alongside party confetti—that when you leave, it feels like you've screwed up an amphetamine or some magic mushroom. I don't even want to think about how you'll leave if you've screwed up everything before you even enter. There are things that, no matter how hard you try to avoid all the packaging, you just can't. Just as when you go shopping in a physical store to maintain the social fabric of the neighborhood, they end up recommending you look for it online.
Christmas lights are already up on the street, and beneath them, people are sleeping and living, because while the clothing bins are overflowing due to the general trend toward single-use items, many people have also ended up with non-returnable waste, and once used, they can be thrown away. The belief that "whoever wants, can" has taken hold, and therefore, whoever can't, doesn't want to. And what we want, while we can, is to consume and maintain a saturated economic model, hoping it doesn't collapse this year, that it lasts a little longer, until next year, at least. And, above all, we spend the necessary money on weapons because let's see if after consuming so much we leave out the most important thing: missiles. Oh, and toilet paper. You'll forgive me, but there's so much to sneeze at.
