Quick: Do you know what the current most-downloaded smartphone app in the US is?
TikTok, you say? Nope.
Insta? Try again.
Here, I’ll help you out, because I took a screenshot today and I circled it for you:
Maybe I’m late to the game on this one (especially considering I have a bachelor’s degree in advertising and this was literally the subject of a Super Bowl ad in January), but please cut me some slack. Most of my pop-culture knowledge nowadays comes only if I read it in the soon-to-be-defunct Buzzfeed News or colossal outlets like the NY Times. This one came to me from a recent New York Magazine feature intriguingly subtitled Imagine if TikTok and Amazon had a baby.
That’s it: Temu. AKA “Shop Like a Billionaire.”
Do you know how to shop like a billionaire?
It’s easy, sing along with me:
I like it, yep it’s mine, the prices blow my mind, cha-ching! I feel so rich, oh yeah, I feel like a billionaire … I’m shoppin’ like a billionaire!
You’d think it was an SNL sketch, except: it’s not. This is the number-one app in the US and it’s just hit Europe and btw it’s clogging up shipping facilities with tons and tons of totally useless cheap crap that people are buying so they can oh-yeah-feel-rich:
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People! Is this what it’s come to? Mindlessly buying craploads of ultra-cheap Chinese-made junk on an app that uses gamification to get you hooked?
I don’t know about you, but I’m troubled by a society that encourages people to fill an emotional void with a bunch of things they don’t need. Because at the end of the day, isn’t that what this is about? The pitch that you, too, can “shop like a billionaire,” as New York Magazine writer John Herrman so aptly put it, “in practice means buying things you probably don’t need without worrying about how much they cost.”
The unstated goal here is that doing so will make you feel happy.
Of course, we’ve all heard the saying that money can’t buy happiness, and the Beatles taught us that money can’t buy love, but there’s actually scientific proof that people who are more materialistic are less happy.
Buying stuff will not bring true happiness. So why do we keep trying?
The anti-materialism manifesto
I certainly don’t have any solution, but learning about Temu and how quickly it’s become the most popular app seemed to me yet another sign of the way our society aggressively pushes values that actively work against true happiness and fulfillment.
The book The Day the World Stops Shopping by J.B. Mackinnon opens with a series of quotes by a variety of big thinkers both ancient and modern, as a reflection on the dilemma that our consumer society has us in:
It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor. (Seneca)
Then he said to the crowd, “Take care to guard against all greed, for though one may be rich, one’s life does not consist of possessions.” (Luke 12:15)
Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed. (Mahatma Gandhi)
A consumers’ society cannot possibly know how to take care of a world … the attitude of consumption spells ruin to everything it touches. (Hannah Arendt)
In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy. (Ivan Illich)
But, out of all the opening quotes, the one that resonated with me the most was from James Baldwin, one of the most astute observers of modern American culture I’ve ever read. The 1971 non-fiction book A Rap on Race is a collection of transcripts of conversations between Baldwin and the anthropologist Margaret Mead, and in it, Baldwin has this to say:
“I have never accepted the notion that you keep a Cadillac or a yacht or anything at all, except perhaps for convenience. I have always had a quarrel with this country not only about race but about the standards by which it appears to live. People are drowning in things. They don’t even know what they want them for. They are actually useless. You can’t sleep with a yacht. You can’t make love to a Cadillac, though everyone appears to be trying to… I think the great emotional or psychological or effective lack of love and touching is the key to the American or even the Western disease.”
― James Baldwin, A Rap on Race
Lack of love as key to the Western disease
You won’t hear any argument from me here; I think Baldwin hit the nail on the head. As a matter of fact, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy is lately speaking out about what he calls a “profound public health challenge”—loneliness. Social isolation. And for a real headline grabber: he said loneliness is as dangerous to health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
Once again we’re reminded that people, not things, are what really matter, what truly bring happiness. Connecting with others. Sharing with others. Giving of our time and talents to others.
This whole frenzy over shopping for cheap stuff to feel filled up reminds me of my recent reflection on social comparison. That piece also ended with a list of ways to connect to others in order to mitigate when “upward comparisons leave you feeling jealous, envious, sad, empty.” These are much the same feelings that come about when we’re pushed to buy and buy and buy, in an endless quest for fulfillment that never comes.
What might be, perhaps, the antidote to the soul-crushing, bucket-with-a-hole emptiness brought on by the values of a consumer culture that flocks in droves to an app like Temu? That’s easy: the very thing they say money can’t buy. Love, in all its most authentic forms. It’s as simple as reaching out to someone you love and connecting with them for a few minutes. (I promise it will be more satisfying to your soul than yet another orange package in the mail.)