Consuming Consumption

Why do we try to get products and commodities physically inside of ourselves?

I have been mulling this idea over for a little while now and the more I think about it the more examples come to mind. When is the last time that you physically hugged an inanimate product? I have done it recently to a much-treasured new item that I bought and it did not strike me as strange. Absolutely, I was doing it mostly in jest to show people how much I appreciated the product: I hardly believed it was a real item. But the very manner of that hug is striking. Products do not actually get mentally or spiritually closer to you with a hug, as might happen with another living being. Instead, they just get closer to physically being inside you.

Another example is a common trope in narrative and also one that I noticed just last night. Instead of trying to 'ingest' commodities, we do the same thing with the money we would use to buy them. A friend of my jokingly kissed a coin last night, some celebrities are said to sleep in piles of money, while the influential Scrooge McDuck swam in it. If we were presented with a bowl of currency and spoon would we delve into it with relish?

Perhaps all of this is just a pose. It is possibly something that we do playfully and in the process, highlight the inanimate nature of the objects through the contrast with conscious beings. There does however seem to be something slightly more sinister in the pattern. It seems that to an extent, we apply sexual desire to commodities in order to prolong our ownership of them. In the same way that we continue our genes, we also continue our possession.

As usual this is just conjecture, yet I will embrace commodities with far more reserve in future.

-The English Student