On Rough Waters of the Consumerism Ocean

Created in March 11, 2025

2025   ·   thoughts

Hey You! Let me bend your ear with a little story of this old wrinkled sailor who lost his most precious resource in exchange for material electronics.

I love my old Bluetooth speaker. We’ve been through a lot but the bloody device has seen better days. Last summer, during a far cruise, I heard a Bose speaker and BLIMEY! What a sweet sound it made… I felt like a magic genie squeezed the whole damn rock band into a jar and made it play any song I wished. It was so captivating. My own speaker suddenly sounded like it was underwater and thrown in an old sock. The thoughts started buzzing and in 2025 I decided to embark on a speaker upgrade expedition. FAIR WARNING: This journey swallowed my weekend whole!

The speaker market is an absolute circus. A carnival of options, that made my gray head spin. I turned into a scholar and studied review sites – rtings.com, soundguys.com, speakerranking.com – each giving a different answer to my question. What speaker is the best for me? Then I got into comparing “frequency response accuracies” and “soundstages” like I’m some audio engineer or PhD student. Yet, I still couldn’t catch the golden fish. I had to alter the course and go through YouTube videos, user reviews, Reddit posts. Oh I ventured so far I’d eaten every last crumb in my pack.

I asked myself a question, is the lengthy journey my problem or a societal disease? I just wanted to make a sensible purchase. I didn’t expect to be paralysed by an abundance of choices. But I don’t dare to blame the system. No, no, no, I’m in big favour of choice. The problem was my decision making. I acted like a Wikipedia competitor; I had to know everything about the speakers. This approach cost me a sunny weekend in the Netherlands. This price, believe it or not, was incredibly high. Anyway, I crafted a small recipe to avoid such fallacies in the future:

  1. Stop trying to min/max the shopping game like it’s some RPG
  2. Put a bloody timer on it – 2 hours max!
  3. Make two lists: “Must-Haves” and “Nice-To-Haves”
  4. Discard any without must-haves, score nice-to-haves and calculate weighted score

Has this worked? For a limited test sample, like a charm! First, I’m content with the diagnosis of this consumerism disease which started to paralyse my head. Confirmed by studies, the faster the decision is made the more satisfaction it yields. Though I found myself reading articles to prove I’d bought the best speaker in the seven seas… classic confirmation bias infecting my left leg. As if all that wasn’t enough, another realisation kicked in, I spend time making dough and I spend time spending it. What a way to treat life’s most precious gems - time and energy!

How do you, my friend, feel about shopping? Do you find yourself swimming in the Consumerism Ocean too often? Perhaps it’s worth pondering with these Taco Hemingway tunes playing in the background:

Lyrics translation available for a modest fee of one fine speaker recommendation!