A psyop is an abbreviated portmanteau of the words psychological and operation, and describes a militaristic strategy that takes advantage of a target’s mental faculties in order to influence behavior. What’s more, a psyop can take many forms. It can be as loud and obvious as a military using bright lights and noise machines to scramble the senses of enemy combatants, or as quiet and undetectable as targeting a populace with intentionally misinformed social media posts to influence public sentiment.

Notably, psyops are not bound to the militaristic domain in fact, they even take on new appearances given the landscape in which they are deployed. For instance, in the civilian sector, these techniques are given new and misleading names like “advertising”, “branding”, “sales”, or “marketing.” Those who want to influence consumers simply use these terms to cover up the psyop they have carefully devised.

I realize that claiming “consumerism is a psyop” may be bit out there, it may sound purely mythological— but it’s the only concept that fits our inability to articulate why we all go shopping or start scrolling as a response to difficult circumstances or emotional grievances. We label these activities as normal—yet they simultaneously feel strange or harmful. I think this tension is a result of subconsciously realizing that some part of our psychological wirings are being exploited. That the parameters we’ve been given to work within are false and of a “psyopic” nature.

But we need not stay within the prescribed and artificially implanted path. One way to shatter these intentionally narrowed and harmful guardrails is to ask why they exist, and to ask why one of our go-to emotional responses is to consume. And once we have our answer, to ask who benefits from these guardrails and our incepted tendency to ingest the slop.