Found this photo series by JeongMee Yoon incredibly disturbing. It makes me wonder — if I had children how much I would invest in their frivolousness. It also makes me chillingly aware of the insane amount of products I must have owned as a child. I’m sure it would have nearly matched these photos. What an insane culture we live in.
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I wonder, now that we are arriving to a point of realization (as demonstrated in works such as these), about particularly wasteful cultural practices, whether we will avoid repeating it in subsequent generations.
But perhaps more ominous to consider: if so, what would happen to our economy? How truly freaky would it be to realize that a sizable portion of our consumerism was based on parents squandering their paychecks to gain the affections of their children… O_o
I remember having an almost opposite experience. My mother never spoiled us. So I ended up drawing all the time on looseleaf paper and leftover marble notebooks from school. It was exciting just to get a good box of colored pencils. It was a luxury to get a pad of paper with NO lines to draw. My sister and I would save up whatever money received as rewards for good grades and buy our own toys. Most of the time we just used what we had and used our imaginations to create our own characters and scenarios. This always involved moving around the furniture in the house to create an “office.” It’s amazing what you can think of. Those were good times.