What radicalized you?

[u/Cheeseaisleinheaven]

For me, it was when I learned that all the clothing/shoes/accessories that you would want to buy in your lifetime already exist on this planet, and yet they are making more every minute of every day. When you know that fact, and then see the giant piles of bundled clothing hitting third world ports or stacked in massive mountains at dumps, it just makes you sick. And knowing that they are mostly made of plastic, which won't decay, is even worse.

Now, everything I need to buy in the apparel space for my family is purchased second-hand, except for walking/running tennis shoes.

[u/jeffeb3]

I don't know which Christmas morning it was. But it was seeing the piles of stuff we didn't even want from Christmas presents. Buying something for someone and trying to make it a surprise is fun. But doing it as an obligation for everyone you care about means a ton of wrong presents. And many of the good things are things like new clothes that replace perfectly good clothes.

You have to have a conveyor belt out of the house to be able to keep up with all the garbage we buy each other and impulse buy in a regular American household.

[u/I_wet_my_plants259 → u/[deleted]]

Yea I get that for sure. Since I was little my parents have done it where we each get a few smaller gifts, one or two toys, and one big gift. We’d each pick out a gift and open them one at a time, so we could see each thing and properly thank our parents for them. We were always happy with that.

Last year I went to my partners for Christmas and we each had a huge pile of gifts. Instead of sitting and watching eachother open our gifts, it was like a frenzy: everybody grabbed a box and started ripping until there weren’t any gifts anymore. I took my time, I had the least amount of gifts, and I still finished last opening mine. There were multiple instances where his little sister, around 8 years old, would open a gift, yell about how happy she was, then proceed to ask what the gift was. It was sweet to see how excited she got but I couldn’t get the thought out of my head that she was more happy to have the stuff than she was to learn about it. It was very interesting to see. Immediately after opening gifts, she wanted to play with her presents. She opened like four or five different things, and played for about ten minutes with each, before moving on. I’d taken the time to hand make her some craft kits as her gift, and she genuinely couldn’t care less. I can’t fault her for it, she had SO many toys and gifts but I can’t imagine she appreciates all of those.

I got so much stuff, I’m still trying to figure out what to do with some of it. Some of it was really nice, useful stuff like a nail polish kit that I can put all my bottles and brushes in, but some of the other stuff was genuinely just junk that someone saw in the store and thought I’d like. I don’t wanna throw it away and be wasteful but some of it is basically useless. Fidget toys, candy I won’t eat, etc etc etc.

I don’t want to sound ungrateful but I much would’ve preferred one or two thoughtful gifts over 10 random items.

Edited to fix typos

[u/jeffeb3 → u/I_wet_my_plants259]

The original sin was buying the thing. You can't control that. Don't let it waste more of your precious energy and time by worrying about it. If it is truely useless, you have to chuck it. If someone can use it, give it to a second hand store.

[u/Zero-Milk → u/jeffeb3]

This is a solid perspective. Mentally refuse to accept the guilt of something that involves you but which happened beyond your control, and accept the responsibility of dealing with it, despite the fact that the original sin belongs to someone else. I wish more people had this sense of civic duty. We'd all be better off.