How parents can survive Back to School

The Back to School shopping season has become an annual cash grab for Big Tech companies that profit from convincing parents that “good enough” isn’t good enough. Every summer, parents are reminded of everything their child needs to survive the school year; a laundry list so long that, before you know it, it feels like you’re creating a brand-new custom character in The Sims that you can’t rage-quit.

In consumer culture, yesterday’s luxuries become today’s essentials. With an endless conveyor belt of brand-new tech to keep up with, we’re too focused on asking when should we upgrade? instead of asking why should we even upgrade in the first place? And to find the answer, first we need to unpack the conditions of manufactured inadequacy. This feeling of lack was first identified by French philosopher Denis Diderot in 1769 with what he coined the Diderot Effect. After receiving a new, beautiful dressing gown, Diderot realized that the rest of his possessions paled in comparison and looked tacky. So, one by one, he replaced all the clothes, furniture, and possessions in his home to match the quality of the new gown, leaving him in financial ruin.

“If the real goal is to give your child the best chance at a good life, the newest device isn’t always the best bet.” - Frankie McNamara

Some 250 years later, the Diderot Effect still holds weight when it comes to our tech. If we buy the newest iPad, we need a new pair of headphones to go with it, maybe an Apple Pencil too, a new case, a keyboard, and eventually a newer MacBook because it’s all part of the same walled garden anyway. And in a materialistic culture, we’ve been taught that happiness is postponed to the future.

Contentment is found in the barcode. And this is the lesson we pass on to our kids: that euphoria can be added to the cart at checkout with an email receipt. We are stuck trying to find life, and when joy feels too tall an order, we have to settle for customer satisfaction. So, on a psychological level, we are still in the shopping center, browsing the aisles—not just for products, but for everything. We see every relationship in our lives through the logic of the market –“What can I get from this person?” – and if we’re honest with ourselves, they probably have a nicer dressing gown than us anyway.

But if the real goal is to give your child the best chance at a good life, the newest device isn’t always the best bet. We need to deprogram our brains from treating products as consumable signs and come back to finding value in their usefulness. A reliable refurbished device that does everything a student needs can help break that cycle and free us from our fear of being left behind, while saving money and reducing electronic waste. In a culture that tells us the upgrade is the answer, and that you’re only as good as your last purchase, the best lesson we can teach our children is that “good enough” is actually good enough.