The Indentured Consumer has several notable and distinct identifiers, chief among them is the fact that the populace is given the opportunity to earn an income. And while this sounds innocuous or even beneficial, this “opportunity” is the very constraint that leads to indentured consumerism. First,  it gives the indentured consumer something to strive for—which distracts them from how bad things usually become. And second, it blames the plight of the downtrodden class on the  downtrodden class itself as opposed to those benefiting from the status quo. Since those who are down bad have the “opportunity” to earn an income and can easily observe a litany of people who have managed to horde wealth, the internalized and often pathologized narrative becomes “if you are struggling to get by, you only have yourself to blame.”

Though in reality, under indentured consumerism, the average income is high enough to enable spending, yet low enough to bar wide-spread financial independence. Which means, those who benefit from the status quo have created an infinite money-glitch built atop a populace who, by design, literally cannot afford to stop the cyclical process. After enough time on the carefully crafted hamster wheel the populace becomes so thoroughly deskilled and so convinced to consume, that their first instinct when faced with a problem is to go shopping or start scrolling for a solution. When this point is reached, when consumerism becomes akin to problem-solving the transformation is complete and a populace of Indentured Consumers has been generated.

Thankfully, we don’t have to keep up the schtick. We can tell ourselves a new story, and we can share that story with those willing to listen. We can get off the treadmill greased by psyopic consumerism and begin to see our tendencies to spend, shop, and scroll as little more than implanted impulses to keep us consuming and thereby propping up The System. In essence, we have become indentured consumers not by accident, but by precedent, and we’ll become something else by choosing to believe in a new way of being.