- planned obsolescence - products that aim to cease functioning after a certain period
- planned obsolescence - the idea of "fashion": it still functions, but someone else has decided that it should be swapped for something that is a different colour/shape/material/other
- buying useless objects, fuelling the cycle of creating useless objects, enabling and requiring people to do more jobs that they do not like (retail, factory etc.)
- work that becomes undone by living (washing clothes, then wearing them, then washing them etc.) - these cycles can be broken by ceasing to live - this adds to the feeling of futility in someone who feels unfulfilled, or someone who is only managing to find the time or energy to do the kind of "work" that repeatedly gets undone (personal hygiene, chores etc.)
This idea can be negative if we are doing jobs we don't enjoy, and earning money that we use to fund businesses where too many people are doing jobs they don't enjoy. Someone can be doing a job that they would not be doing, given the choice, and their money can be used to fund suffering (e.g. factory farming, sweatshops) and boredom (e.g. factory jobs, retail jobs). In an ideal world, everyone would be getting paid to do something that felt fulfilling, and their money would be used to pay other people to do jobs that felt fulfilling. This, I guess, would be an argument in favour of funding smaller businesses - someone pouring coffee in a cafe that they are helping to run, and that feels like their own, is quite possibly a lot happier than someone pouring coffee in a Starbucks.
The lower someone's wage is, the more likely it is that they have to get their food, clothes, etc. from businesses where more people have jobs that are unfulfilling. This is a cycle that can sometimes be slowed by reducing the consumption of unnecessary objects (for example, in the case of a broke student who still buys a lot of clothes), but sometimes it is almost impossible (for example, some people only earn enough to buy food that is unfairly traded or unethically sourced - the consumer may not have the power to change this, but large companies, in this case supermarkets, do).
