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.

As soon as we entered the mall, we ran into a large group of girls getting excited over a doll that was simply a furry brown rectangle with eyes. I felt old and embarrassingly analog in front of all these young women who behaved as if this pile of synthetic fibers were a rock star or a genie who granted wishes. "Jellyfish!" they shouted, "Jellyfish!" I suddenly became an innocent anthropologist before a primitive culture that was completely incomprehensible to me. Why were these people so excited about an object with no objective value that the observer could grasp with the naked eye? Did it perhaps have healing or magical properties? It was evident that the product contained some kind of value that went far beyond reality. All civilizations and cultures have created things to which they have attributed an invented symbolic charge, from religions to everyday superstitions. The novelty in these times of ultra-liberal and digital capitalism is that useless objects are bought and sold en masse, and the meaning given to them is volatile and changing.