Buyer's Remorse

Tariffs, Stocks and Other Shit We Don't Need.

I haven’t purchased a new phone in over ten years. Being a strange form of teacher who occasionally leads wealthy students into far corners of the globe for various reasons, every few years, as most of these bright-eyed buckeroos come from pretty affluent families and receive a new phone upgrade every time a new one comes out, they oftentimes generously gift their old one to me. Pretty nice deal. I never get any tips for the work I do, but having not had to buy a phone has worked out pretty nicely. However, as I have been working less with youngsters and more with grown-ups in recent years, the last hand-me-down phone I received was around the time iPhone mysteriously skipped a few generations and presented the world with “X”. As it goes, eventually our toys begin to wear and tear. And on a recent trip through India, my phone finally started to show signs of its impending demise, so when I got back to Thailand, I purchased a new phone.

“Oroboros” 2021. Anthony White (USA)

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I am a terrible shopper. I mean, well, not in all circumstances. Before China demolished the legendary Khan Bazaar in Kashgar, and all the ocean side fruit stands with all the carnival sounds of calypsonians in Cahuita, Costa Rica were forced to close for purposes of building a “National Park” I loved shopping in places like these, bargaining with Uyghurs and Bedouins, mystics, Rastas and saints and all kinds of colorful, magical craftsmen in their gorgeous felt tents protecting them from sandstorms coming of the Taklamaka, and bamboo huts laden with handspun hammocks, feisty monkeys and sweet sweet bananas. We would drink tea then, offered freely, and go back and forth about prices and legends and tell one wonderful lie after another about the origins of various metals and gems as we fell further in love with the majesty of life. What a gas it t’was! To be sure, THIS kind of shopping I like! And how I yearn for it still! But alas, going into some florescent lit mall filled with fast food restaurants and Christmas lights that have yet to come down in the middle of March is, well, NOT my cup of tea. In such cases I become easily frustrated, grow increasingly cranky and tired, become overly judgmental, etc. It’s a nightmare for anyone who is with me, usually my beloved wife.

No doubt to get it all over with, it was my wife in the end who convinced me to get a new phone. We were waiting in a car mechanics office in Lamphun when she told me that because the iPhone 17 was coming out soonish I could get a good deal on an older model. I did a rapid fire skim through Consumer Reports and Tom’s Guide and found that most of the reviews unanimously agreed that the iPhone 15 was the way to go! That only a sucker would buy any previous models. And I ain’t no sucka!

I was fresh back from a whirlwind trip through India and Vietnam. We were at the hospital that morning to welcome my sister-in-laws new baby into the world, a gorgeous healthy girl born to a strong, 45-year-old mother of another two boys, one 27 and the other 19. That afternoon we drove two hours from there to our farm to pack all our bags for the 4 day drive to southern Thailand to escape the annual smokey season. Needless to say, I wasn’t thinking clearly. I just knew that as a 43-year-old man, a father, someone trying to pass as a professional with many fancy universities around the world, not to mention with his new family of total badasses that I definitely needed a phone. My wife said go for it. So I pulled the trigger. “Get the 15”, I told the nice lady at the store. And that was that.

Having lived in Thailand for over a decade now, you’d think I’d have a better grasp on the local currency. But no. It all still seems like monopoly money to me. Colored bills with kings printed on them?! So fun! And with the numbers being in the thousands, it’s all too much for me to properly conceptualize. Regardless whether something is 500 Thai bhat or 500, a thousand, or ten, it all sounds the same in my gringo brain. But eventually I saw the price show up in my bank report, in USD. “HOLY SHIT!” I yelled aloud, covering my daughters ears, “Did I just spend $600 on a fucking phone!?”

The swanky new phone doesn’t do all that much more than my other phone did. It takes pictures, sends emails, allows me to distract myself easily, etc. I mean, to be fair, the camera is way better, which is nice, because in all seriousness, due to the hateful immigration policies of the current administration Stateside, we likely won’t be returning to the good ol’ U.S. of A. any time soon, so it is nice to send pretty photos of our daughter to grandma and grandpa. But was this thing really worth spending $600?! Hell no! And especially not when I am actively trying to raise money to support my friends in Myanmar who are literally going through a war right now and could feed an entire village there for a month of that kind of money.

To call what I feel now “buyers remorse” is a gross understatement. I feel like an asshole. I keep playing the numbers over and over in my head. How many people could I have helped had I just kept my old phone, or bought a cheaper one?! How was I so quick to justify something so utterly unnecessary? How was I so duped into this whole sickening capitalistic seduction so easily? Aren’t I better than this??

Friends often tell me I’m too hard on myself. Sure, it’s not good to beat oneself up, and I do tend to do that to myself too regularly. I get its not the most healthy thing to do. But in this instance, it seems like an appropriate energetic reaction, one that mirrors in many ways what all of the modern world does; Every. Frickin'. Day. We all keep buying shit we don’t need! Constantly. We just cant help ourselves. And we wonder why the world we love is dying! We take and take and take and take. Without even thinking about the implications of our incessant mining. And it’s not only the fact that our generation over-consumes, of course it’s more complex than this. But the way most of us typically live in this hyper-individualistic era is so far beyond anything that might be considered reasonable that what is blatantly unreasonable is justified! And I fell for it. Hook, line and sinker.

A friend of mine from Myanmar, by divine morbid chance told me the day after the tragic 7.7 magnitude earthquake hit his home town of Mandalay, that his family needed new phones as theirs were all destroyed. Of course I sent my old phone to him immediately. But for $600 I could have sent a couple dozen. And no, I don’t think I am being all that hard on myself. Rather, what I do think is that most of us might benefit from, well, being a tad bit harder on ourselves, both as individuals and as a society. We seem to glorify people who put pressure on themselves to have an “empire state of mind”. When we hear of people staying up all night making content or waking at 4:00 A.M. to hit the gym we congratulate their dedication to self improvement. But why don’t we hear more about developing a mature, heightened empathetic view? Because the truth is, we don’t need to all aspire to have chiseled abs, to get the most likes on IG, be an epic entrepreneur or influencer or whatever trend is fashionable at the hour. But it seems like a foundational aspiration of any mature, initiated person and/or society to acquire an inextinguishable aspiration to truly be of benefit. And the pre-requisite in this 11th hour of late stage capitalistic cataclysm and climate catastrophe is simple; WE MUST STOP BUYING SHIT WE DON’T NEED.

“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”

― David W. Orr, Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World

I wonder what “buyer’s remorse” feels like to people like Elon Musk. After wasting $25M on the recent Wisconsin supreme court election what thoughts went through his brilliant, troubled head? Do you think he considered for a moment how many people could have been fed with that money? How many homeless could have been housed? Do you think he lost sleep wondering why he was so easily suckered into Trumps hateful game when he could, just have easily, been a real hero and instead spent his millions on making technology that could clean up rivers and oceans the world over?

Does something happen to us, when we play the game for too long, that allows our ability to feel the weight of poor choices through the lens of empathy to atrophy? When we have been conditioned by so called “development” long enough do we simply no longer remember what it feels like to be dependent on all life, that we all are responsible for each other and that all our actions have implications far beyond just us? At some point, as we rise above the seemingly less fortunate existence of the worlds poor, do we become so far removed from earth and humanity that we eventually we feel nothing at all?

I wonder what all the big players on Wall Street feel now, as their money vanishes before their very eyes in lieu of Trumps narrow-sighted tariff sweep. Are they feeling remorse for not instead investing in seeds, in the planting of trees, in collective efforts to regenerate the worlds soil and purify air? What does “buyer’s remorse” feel like to these glorified gamblers? What does it feel like to have all the made-up money you didn’t work for suddenly vaporize, with nothing to show for it but the memory of adrenaline rushes, lustful dreams and high fives from the bros?

The fact is, in the so-called “developed” world nearly everyone lives like kings. I once took a friend of mine from Nicaragua to a housing facility for the homeless outside of Chicago. He couldn’t believe what he saw. He spent most of his life building homes out of cedar blocks for people in his community with funds provided to him by wealthy citizens of Los Estados. And though most in The States would consider these housing units filthy, he considered it hi-so. Ones mans trash is indeed another’s treasure. Yet being without money does not necessarily mean being poor. Nicaragua, like so many other countries throughout the Americas, was leveled by colonization, so poverty means an entirely different thing there than it does in say, Thailand, where, for all intents and purposes, colonization has never occurred, where people never had their culture stolen from them, their land stripped away from under their feet and traditional educational systems disseminated. For people who still have these things, money isn’t necessarily a necessity.

For anyone who has spent time in the mountains north of Chiang Mai, not in the posh resorts of say, Pai, but in the lesser known hillsides, similar to where my family lives, you may recall how simple people here generally live. When viewed from the eyes of someone from the developed world, the quality of life here might seem low. The world bank and the like consider these places “poor”. Yet, at least for the people who haven’t entirely sold out to modernities unsustainable methods of agriculture and trade that are rooted not in reciprocity or right relations but purely in the foul, lifeless soil of perpetual greed for infinite economic gain, well, most here will not feel the effects of this ongoing trade war. People here who may look poor to a financially rich tourist know far more about how to live well that anyone solely dependent on commerce. Because here we buy very little. We grow everything we need. We share, we save seeds, and WE DON’T BUY SHIT WE DON’T NEED.

Anthony White. (USA) Everything Must Go | 2022

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Which is why, on those strange moments when we’re overworked, under-slept, out of our element with bellies full with modernities steady diet of processed sugar and bad cappuccino, dizzy and hypnotized by the pretty lights of the big city, we fall victim to the onslaught of toxic consumerism, we feel remorse. Not the kind of self-hating, in- danger-of-doing-self-harm kind of remorse, but a noble kind of, shall we say, regret. And that, I feel, is a good thing.

We probably should feel bad when we spend thousands of dollars for a hotel room on holiday but don’t offer any money to support those dedicated peaceful warriors mere miles away on the front lines trying diligently to get food and supplies into Myanmar, or Gaza or any conveniently glanced-over corner of the good ol’ U.S. of A. for that matter. We should feel guilty when we realize that somehow we feel perfectly fine buying yet another ugly Gucci bag or gaudy sunglasses or an overpriced t-shirt made from materials we know nothing about by people we have no relationship with yet get offended when we see the price tag of a scarf in Laos made from lotus fiber, handmade by master artisans from actual lotus flower stems harvested from the over-dammed Mekong River that their family has depended on for hundreds of years.

Feeling shame isn’t always a bad thing. If our spirit hasn’t been completely devoured by the ghosts of modernity, this all-too-often misunderstood emotion can serve as a very handy red light flashing outwards from the depths of our soul shouting, “Something is amiss my beloved, you’ve drifted too far from the shore. It’s time to come back home…”

What are we really feeling stung by now? What do we miss? What are we hoping to get back and for what reason? Did we merely lose out on getting what we wanted or did we lose our entire purpose for being alive? Are we upset because we just missed an opportunity to get rich or are we heartbroken that we didn’t take the time to learn what the forest really wanted from us, what the Moon meant by allowing Herself to be eclipsed by the Sun?

watercolor painting by Inga Simonyte Deniz (Türkiye)

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We need to allow our hearts to break. We need to feel deeply into this moment. We took too much. All of us. How fortunate that now we can finally let it all go!

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May we not find ways to improve the economy but strengthen our mythic investments in ecology.

May we again find ways to go into good debt, the kind of debt that makes us live with intergenerational integrity.

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#maypeaceprevailonearth