The Commodified Life

It’s increasingly difficult to separate who we are from a commodified idea of ourselves. We live within the historical transition between these states of being – there are people alive who were not born into a consumer capitalist world (circa 1930), although they will soon be dead. They can see a field bathed in evening sunlight without consciously or unconsciously considering what it might say about who they are. In an ever-growing feedback loop, we project an amorphous set of ideas and images onto ourselves and others. The accumulative aspect of which, is why people will continue to become more commodified. Commodification does not have a knowable endpoint and would more likely be ended by collective complacency that led to an economic collapse, war or something ultimately outside of our control like a meteor or an AI death. 

Social media is one of many portals to the commodification of the individual. It externalises an internal process inside the commodified individual, making it more explicitly transactional – illuminating that this exists in most aspects of contemporary life. Commodification exists in the individual’s core, so it is elusive and hard to define. As most of us are commodified, we are forever diagnosing an aspect of ourselves – if we were not, we would be unable to see it or find the words to express it. Commodification sits adjacent to human nature and uses human impulses to reinforce the individual’s conceptual aspect – we are in the era where our facial expressions in photographs are part of a wider meta-fictional narrative about our ideal selves. They exist privately in the mirror or publically on social media. 

Everything can be commodified: walking down the street, a holiday, a photograph of you, a sunset, spending time with your children, or the death of a loved one. There is no limit because the idea of us has become more significant than the actuality of us – the ideal is a god that we bring offerings to. Present-day experience serves as a time to consume content, review other people’s content or (most importantly) capture content. We live in service to a higher conceptualised version of ourselves. As explained earlier, content does not only mean social media content – it is a largely subconscious and pathological state of being. Every aspect of life can be offered and burned (or consumed) as a sacrifice to our higher selves. This largely subconscious phenomenon exists to greater and lesser degrees in the core of every individual, but for most people, it is a subtle and insidious process.

For anything regarding the commodified individual to make sense, there must be some distortion or abstraction of an otherwise “natural” pattern of human behaviour. Set to an exclusively Western cultural backdrop, where some more fundamentally understood aspects of being are now considered socially constructed, the word “natural” relates to behaviours unanimously regarded as universal human experiences. Friendship, love, celebration, death, birth, sex, grief, happiness, depression and fear are some of our base states, a layer of universal human experiences that exist on a fundamental level. Sitting above these, and therefore incorporating aspects of these base states into action, are experiences like discovery, experimentation, storytelling, questioning, and creativity.

Commodification occurs in an individual’s mind when they cannot engage with, experience or enact these human behaviours and feelings without considering the value of these things in relation to an idea of themselves. Everything is converted into a sort of social currency and value. It might be hard to imagine that somebody would post a picture of themselves, on their business-activated social media account, with a look of stoic contemplation in their underwear on a bed following the death of their newly born baby. That a grieving mother might include the hashtags #grief #birthright #postnataltrauma in a comment (partially hidden) within the comments is ultimately depressing. This is an extreme and regrettably real pattern of behaviour that happens internally and externally amongst billions of people daily.

Acting in this way is corrosive. Finding commercial value in every aspect of life has long-term consequences. It will infect other aspects of life – especially when the commercial value has become an invisible incentive to the human being. It is right to say that as the writer of this, I am a commodified individual guilty of the same behaviour. However, it doesn’t seem clear to me that having an awareness of one’s commodification does anything to free the individual from that process other than spawning another meta-narrative. On the contrary, it seems to bind the individual more deeply to it and produce cynicism and nihilism that, aside from making self-referential judgements, is ultimately unhelpful.