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C O N S Y O U T H M E R I S M

If there are any similarities with any major brands, they are purely (in)coincidental.

My fellow youth friends, have you ever felt confused on deciding the things that you really want and the things that you really need?

Well, it might be one of the early symptoms proving that you are diagnosed with what I call as a consyouthmerism.

As a part of the Generation Y, especially the twentysomethings youth, we are prone to be plunged into the economically constructed culture of consumerism.

An article in Buzzfeed written by Gayatri Jayaraman highlighted the unnerving trend of the 'Urban Poor':
"...the metro-dwelling twentysomethings who've internalised the pressures surrounding them, and spend a majority of their salaries on keeping up the lifestyles and appearances that they believe are essential to earning those salaries."

Deriving from Gayatri's discourse, we can see that the root causes for the emerging trend of Urban Poor is our existing consumeristic tendencies to spend a great deal of our money to gain some social values that are considered as 'essential' to our jobs, or even to our lives.

We buy the things we don't need, pretending that their superficially expensive prices will enhance our quality as urban citizens. The moment we end up putting aside our priority over our desire to appear prestigious, it's the moment when we are bound to be a part of a consyouthmerism.

Overpriced coffees, overpriced sportswear, overpriced gadgets, overpriced make-ups, they ended up being inevitable necessities in order to uphold our social status.

Some of us even justified our actions as a 'personal right' to spend as much money as we want on the things that makes us 'happy'. But look at ourselves. By thinking so, we might just materialized our happiness. By thinking so, we have just limited our capacity to reach our happiness into certain 'expensive' circumstances which we might not be able to provide all the time.

I'm not trying to be hypocritical. I have to admit, even sometimes I find it quite hard for me to hold my desire of buying the things I don't need. One thing I have personally tried is at least to gradually reduce my 'tertiary spending' and channel it for the things I need in the first place.

Above all, we really need to start stepping on the brake and stop this mass-manipulation that's been deluding us to feed the culture of consumerism.

Wake up, young people. It won't be soon before we are strangled in debts and lost our freedom to the shackles of capitalism.

What we want is not always the same with what we need. And instead of getting what we want all the time, perhaps we can help to fulfill the need of other people. We might be luckier than we thought we were.

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