the timboucher experience

I was just cruising around a little bit on disinformation and came across a link to the vainglorious “Buy Nothing Day.” If you’ve never heard of this, it’s supposed to be some kind of “international day of protest” on the 26th of November where…

[M]illions of people around the world do not participate — in the doomsday economy, the marketing mind-games, and the frantic consumer-binge that’s become our culture. We pause. We make a small choice not to shop. We shrink our footprint and gain some calm. Together we say to Exxon, Nike, Coke and the rest: enough is enough. And we help build this movement to rethink our unsustainable course.

I guess they have it on the 26th, since that’s Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, which is supposed to be the biggest shopping day of the year.

I’ve heard whispers of this for the past several years, but I’ve never formally participated. Actually, I think it’s annoying. I’ll get to that in a second. Not surprisingly, it’s run by AdBusters. AdBusters annoys me to no end. There is a Beavis & Butthead episode, I forget which one, where one of them says something to the effect of:

The whole point of college music is to make the suburbs look bad.

This completely sums up how I feel about AdBusters and about this Buy Nothing Day thing. I mean, technically, I agree with pretty much everything that they are getting at. I think people would do well to disconnect themselves from “the machine”. Stop throwing money down an endless hole. Stop buying stuff you don’t need or really even want. Hell, stop paying taxes, stop working. Stop believing what the media and government tell you…

I mean, I advocate all that stuff and try to enact it myself wherever possible. I just think its totally lame to have one single day per year where you do any of that because it’s fashionable, and because you’re trying to rebel against how you were raised. I’d rather see a day devoted to not being an asshole, or to not trying to force your ideals down other people’s throats. How great would that be just to have one day a year where we all agreed not to run out and proselytize and evangelize and vote our views into power, and where we actually let people go their own way, and we recognized that none of us has all the answers, and we’re all just people trying to make it the best we can? Now, that’s an “international day of protest” I could really get behind.

• Tim gets a little bit of money
• On Buying What You Want
• You break it, you buy it
• The Polyphonic Spree
• I’m just trying to take a piss