Encountering advertisements on a daily basis has become as equivalent as breathing in today day and age ,especially through social media platforms. We encounter ads everywhere on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Tik-Tok, magazines, and Spotify. People have lost track of the total amount of advertisements they have seen or heard. America’s modern society has been built on consumption, constantly telling Americans to want, to need and to buy more products despite them being unnecessary.
In 2021 the average person is estimated to encounter 6,000 to 10,000 ads every single day. The amount of advertisements has doubled. The number,we’d have seen in 2007, is 12 times more than what people were seeing in the 70’s.
People don’t realize how much they spent on the product that they later throwing away in less than a week. They began to realize it was never once needed in the first place. Over-consumption is normalized in today’s society through promotion of these ads.
“I think people are susceptible to ads into thinking that they’re helping by buying lots of things”-Nicole
“I think people are susceptible to ads into thinking that they’re helping by buying lots of things”
— Nicole Anderson
Many purchases bought are non-essentials. Like buying every clothes for a fashion trend only to last a few weeks. Perhaps buying the newest iPhone 15 that looks exactly like the previous one, but only buying it because of newer functions. Later products pile up by throwing away a one time used item causing mass pollution in land fills. The amount of people spent on non-essentials is around $18,000 per year. American’s waste 4.4 pounds per person a day, might have been seem as a small amount but adding everything up it rounds up to 1.6 million per day. A lot of these products we consume have unsustainable packaging,creating pollution in our ecosystem.
Some solutions to end over consumption is to reduce spending to buy what is necessary, learn to restrict yourself from spending your money away. Along with multiple amounts of clothes piled up every year, instead of throwing your clothes away or store up in a box somewhere in your closet. Many places are available for donations and giveaways. Like the crimson closet collecting used clothes from high school students, and recycling them to other high school students in need.
“we collect gently used clothing from the community. So we have a donation box at the Elks Lodge downtown and right here in our front office, the students sort through it and anything that they deem not wearable by a high school student we donate to the homeless shelter echo, and then anything that we do decide to keep we clean if we have to, and then rehang or refold and make clothing available to students every Wednesday during tutorial.”-Brianne Overton — Brianne Overton
