Is it even capitalism anymore? This Thursday! How to align your spending with your values

Hey it’s Pam 🦋

RSVP here for this month’s Creatives Thrive NYC workshop, How to Align Your Spending with Your Values, on Thursday 3/19 at 1pm ET.

This workshop is going to be full of big questions and one of the big ones we’re asking each other is:

Is it even capitalism anymore? Think about it:

We don’t work the same types of jobs, & every side has a hustle

38% of the US workforce did some type of freelance work in 2023. That means we are paying more taxes, have less benefits, and are more expendable. It’s hard for our labor to NOT be exploited these days.

Every joy is commodified and commercialized

The pressure to monetize everything peaked in the girlboss era of the 2010’s, but now, it’s just an expectation. Unlearning that not everything needs to be a commodity and not every idea needs to be a business idea.

Our personal lives are on display for judgment

Here’s your daily social-media-isn’t-real reminder - don’t judge your worst moments against someone’s best moments. Also, I’m sorry because I’m scrolling through instagram doing that right now. I probably saw this worst moments best moments quote on instagram.

Authenticity is everyone’s Brand. Also everyone has a Brand

If everyone has a brand, everyone has something to sell and everyone is constantly being asked to buy. We don’t just buy from stores anymore, we buy from each other. Which really means we’re buying things from stores and putting our “brand on it” to sell to other people who are also buying things from stores to sell to other people

We don’t shop the same, and the places we buy from don’t source the same

We didn’t think it could get worse than Amazon, then along came Shein and Temu. Can we even call these places stores anymore? They’re all just networks of warehouses with underpaid workers trying to package things as quickly as possible and getting paid as little as possible.

This comment about delivery workers lives rent free in my head:

And yet.

Sometimes it’s so overwhelming to think about how big the problem is and how small we are that the only thing it feels like we can do is… buy something.

Let’s unpack all that together. Join us this Thursday 3/19 at 1pm ET and we’ll talk through the whole complicated mess of how to align your spending with your values.