#and photographed and put onto webshops and catalogues

[throwing-roses-into-the-abyss]

idk but at some point in the past couple of years I started really thinking about the amount of very human work that still goes into everything we own even if it's factory made. like, someone at some point had the idea to add a foot pedal to trash cans. someone decided to add fun lights to electric water kettles so you can see the water boil. someone designed the sticker with the picture of a pizza that's on my oven door. someone took that picture of the pizza. Ssomeone (lots of people actually) designs basic ikea furniture. someone (also, again, lots of people actually) designs all those silly or boring or cliche postcards. (well, not all of them anymore because AI but up until recently every single postcard ever that you could buy was, technically, a small piece of art made by a human). and even after having these ideas, someone had to actually engineer the foot pedal and then someone had to find the material to make them and someone has to ship those materials to the factory, and someone had to figure out how to configurate the machines in the factory to make them, and the list goes on

every bit of soulless junk available has involved a whole bunch of people not only to design and make but then to pack and send and deliver and sell (not to mention marketing and package design and webshop/catalogue design and maintenance and warehouses etc etc etc)

(also btw, I know no one thinks about this but the machines in factories that mass produce your stuff? those machines are man made. a human designs those machines and then other humans put them together and then someone ships them and someone puts them together in a building built by people and THEN they can start mass producing and even then humans are often involved in a lot of the steps even if they're not directly making the product.)

idk it's just so easy to dismiss products as soulless useless junk or to just simply not think about the sheer amount of human ingenuinety and effort and work by so many people that goes into getting your silly little everyday use product to your house. it's really made me appreciate and respect all these things so much more to really think about all the people and the resources involved before it actually gets to me. things are so precious and these production systems are so complex and fragile and we don't treat most things with nearly as much reverence and respect as we should (myself included)

also once you start thinking of these things and think about the billions of products being made every day and the amount of resources they use it absolutely boggles your mind and suddenly the whole "earth overshoot day" thing makes SO much more sense