Back in July, I started a pretty ambitious project as an inexperienced and disorganized blogger. For the Month of Masks I aimed to use one mask every day for the month of July, with weekly check ins here and daily check ins on my Instagram. And I did not last even two weeks. I did the daily check ins for a while, and then got behind, and I didn’t even get to week two of the weekly check ins. As far as blogging challenges go, this was a miserable failure.
In the blogging sphere, something that has been coming up a lot more lately is the question of consumerism. How much we as bloggers specifically are buying versus how much we’re using. Our actual need for things verus our imagined need, which in reality is simply want. Consumerism in general is a big part of society, but the blogging world in particular is an interesting way of seeing it in depth and up close.
The why, and the how have been hard to pin down, beyond the fact that we simply live in a consumerist society. Why do we as bloggers, in particular, see this so much? How are we affecting others? And is there anything that we can do about it?
A quick note: this isn’t written from a place of judgment, as I’ve had my own fair share of issues with this. All I want to do with this post, is start a conversation. If you like buying things and are comfortable in your consumption, that’s absolutely fine. This is just looking at why some of us may feel the way we do if we are uncomfortable with our personal consumption, and how we might be able to relate to it in a healthier way.
There are a few hot button issues floating around the online blogging community. Among these are cosmetic procedures, buying followers, bots, and also photography. Everyone’s worried about their own quality of content, and also concerned about what everyone else is doing. The latter deserves its own post, but there’s something to it that isn’t bad. We learn by observing, and when you scroll through Instagram long enough, you start to see some shit.
Every so often, the topic of photo editing in particular gets dredged up from what I can only assume is the ninth circle of hell. Usually in the form of a complaint. And it’s still a hot topic in terms of society, which it rightfully should be. But there’s a lot of context to these discussions, which sometimes gets lost. And sometimes, the context doesn’t matter at all. Opinions are often either extreme, or completely neutral. And honestly, that’s pretty interesting. Something as seemingly innocuous as photo editing can cause a bit of a riot.
