No, Not Every Brand Needs to Become a Movement

People seem to crave community and empowerment, nowadays.

And that’s to be expected, amidst a so-called loneliness epidemic and a general lack of meaning in life. This leads to what writer Antonio Melonio recently called a “mass existential crisis” in his Substack essay, writing, “We are already balls-deep in an existential crisis, whether we admit it or not. Look around: an entire civilization clinging to bullshit jobs, lonely coffee breaks, flavorless office humor, and a daily commute that feels like a funeral procession for the soul. People numb themselves with endless scrolling, TV show marathons, or that watery beer at happy hour—anything to distract from a gnawing emptiness.”

Oof. That’s one way to put it.

But as he says, we’re in the midst of that crisis whether we want to admit it or not. Hell, whether we want to recognize it or not, it’s the reality that we’re all dealing with. Some people, like Melonio, have better words for it than others, including me. Nonetheless, this doesn’t stop me from trying to express my thoughts and feelings every now and again through my writing. Most recently, I’ve been thinking about the ways that we try to compensate for this loneliness epidemic and general nihilistic milieu. It often results in clinging to certainty where there shouldn’t be any, perhaps why political and religious extremes are thriving right now. Perhaps it also manifests in the search of and clinging to social and consumerist movements with which we may identify.

This brings me to a hobby with which I’ve only recently started engaging: fragrance shopping. Like a novice Jeremy Fragrance, I’ve expanded my fragrance collection from just a few select bottles to more than I care to admit in a relatively short amount of time. I do this because it’s fun; it’s fun to smell nice, it’s fun to discover new fragrances, it’s fun to explore different notes and layerings, and it’s fun to bargain hunt on different discounter websites to find the best price for the most niche and sought-after fragrances. In other words, I buy and sample fragrances for extremely basic and simple reasons. These reasons do not include becoming a part of some esoteric movement or community.

And believe me, there is a community! There is a large community on Tiktok, YouTube, and other platforms of “fragrance influencers”, a community to which the aforementioned Jeremy Fragrance belongs. There are conventions and other events that exist to host and cater to this community. I suppose, in some way, it certainly serves as a means for building community for some. But I don’t need some brand to tell me that.

A few weeks ago, I received a package from a discounter with a few fragrances that I had ordered. It was branded packaging and well-packed. Inside the package atop the fragrances was a note with a font suggestive of handwriting, though it was very clearly typed/printed. It boasted a mission that goes beyond “offering scents” and instead goes further to “build connections” It stated that I’m not just a customer, I’m a friend. It was “signed” by two people, whom I do not know and am unlikely to ever meet in my life, digitally or in-person. This faux handwritten note is the closest I’ll get to ever being made aware of their existence.

Well, that’s pretty mundane, right?

Sure. But that’s just one recent example.

More recently, I joined a movement to revolutionize the way clothing is made because I ordered a shirt from a company that maintains “direct relationships” with the overseas factories from which its clothing is supposedly ethically sourced. Additionally, I joined a community to radically change mental health care because I signed up to receive email newsletters from a mental health care nonprofit. And if you can believe it, I was inadvertently invited to join a movement to pioneer the world’s first “brewless” coffee (instant coffee for young people) because I scrolled to the right Tiktok advertisement.

Here’s the thing, though. I don’t want to join your movement. I just wanted to buy a shirt. I just want to stay up-to-date on news that’s relevant to the field in which I work. I just want to mindlessly scroll sometimes without some vexing invitation trying to suck me into buying an obscure pioneering product that does nothing to make the world a better place.

This is nothing new, though. This is a shift that’s been happening for over a decade and a half, mostly thanks to millennials. Millennials grew up at a weird time; they’re old enough to have experienced life without the Internet and hyper-connectivity, to have endured several once-in-a-generation economic crises, and to have enjoyed the absolute degradation of social cohesion and the siphoning off of any type of social safety net by the billionaire class, but young enough to have overtaken boomers as the largest adult cohort, to have influenced social and economic movements disproportionately to other generations, and to have become the most educated age group in this country’s history.

Millennials are also an age group that want their brands politically aligned with their own values. In 2013, Forbes highlighted that the best way to reach millennials was to engage in a conversation or a dialogue to make them feel connected. In 2014, Boston Consulting Group found that ”…status, luxury, consuming, adventure, excitement, and travel are increasingly important” to millennials, compared to older generations that prioritized patriotism, religion, and calm. In 2019, Business Insider highlighted some of the ways in which millennials affected change in social and economic spheres by prioritizing convenience and utilizing social media to change the way people and companies interact. There are, of course, hundreds of other articles highlighting different values and interests of millennials, but the synthesis is this: millennials lack the kind of social cohesion of older generations and are therefore easily susceptible to distractions that promise the connection and cohesion that otherwise no longer exists.

To be clear, I’m not a fan of the faux social cohesion that used to exist for older generations. To reference comedian Tim Dillon: older generations got along with each other because the early neoliberal age was built on blood and war and economic instability in other countries, not in our own. Millions of people had to die for our ability to enjoy a McFlurry and our McMansions, but people always died, so it’s foolish not to enjoy the end of the empire, Dillon argues. Hyperbolic or not, his claims highlight a simple truth: social and political cohesion don’t exist like they did in the 1980s and 1990s. This is not to claim that things were perfect then, but the neoliberal claim to power was significantly clearer and cleaner at that time than it is now.

This brings me back to shopping online. I don’t want to join a movement or become a part of some society every time I buy my damn cologne or purchase my new shirt. I’m past enjoying the spoils of the end of the empire, I’m past buying into the nonsensical and misleading claims to community and empowerment, and I’m past actively numbing the gnawing emptiness. I’ve reached acceptance. In the meantime, I’m simply interested in those small joys that make rebelling against the menial quotidian more bearable.

Header photo courtesy of Unsplash.