2023, Do you like holiday shopping?

With Lunar New Year early in 2023, capitalism had a heyday with three major holidays (Christmas, New Year’s Eve and Lunar New Year) colliding within just a few weeks time. This was taken to extremes in the neighborhood we live in – Xinyi, the finance and shopping center of Taipei, famous for Taipei 101.

To be honest, growing up in a frugal family in a small town and being around green progressives much of my live, it took me a lot of time to get used to the sheer excited exuberance and consumerist splurge around here. But life is much easier not judging other people, and coming by the area more or less every day was kind of shock therapy. While I still don’t consider shopping a hobby, I do enjoy going on a hunt with my camera. I can now appreciate the joy many seem to find it spending a day strolling around all the wonders produced by the connected supply chains of our world, and the creativity of the various design and advertising teams, spending hundreds of hours to produce the banalities that flank my way.

If capitalism is our religion, this area – one of the densest commercial areas in the world – is one of its cathedrals.

(Of course, capitalism is not a religion. It’s just being able to buy and sell what you want. It’s the wanting that’s the bigger problem, I suppose.)