Neon colors! Flashing lights! AI-assisted thingamajig! More features than ever before decorate today’s top products, from the newest JoJo Siwa scrunchies to the most recent edition of the AirPods Max. Which competitor’s multi-billion dollar marketing campaign will succeed at persuading you to purchase their “one-of-a-kind” and “never-seen-before” product? If the answer is none of them, that’s okay. Just wait a month or two, and the next “one-of-a-kind” and “never-seen-before” product will hit the market to try to persuade you once again to give a company your money. From weaving in and out of our social media feeds to preceding our YouTube videos, ads are everywhere. And we’ve gotten used to them. Innovative and eye-catching products have become the new norm, constantly replacing last month’s rave with something bigger and better. While this is great for our competitive free market economy, it’s damaging to our empathy. Because consumerism has trained us to constantly expect something new, it’s damaged our ability to care about what is constant: the issues that don’t go away once you see a headline about them.

“A business that doesn’t change is a business that is going to die,” according to Frank Perdue, the CEO of one of the largest poultry farming companies in the United States, Perdue Farms. And he’s right—the trends and obsessions that dominated 2010 or even 2023 are no longer relevant to today’s world of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Thus, for a business to survive, it must adapt to change and predict market trends to inform its strategies and meet the needs of its customers. Coupled with a sense of competition, this pressure results in companies creating these so-called “one-of-a-kind” and “never-seen-before” products on a regular basis.

Though necessary for survival in the business world, this conditions us, as consumers, to expect the new and dismiss the old. After all, who would want the iPhone 8 when the iPhone 15 is available? This mindset leads us to put more value in the newer, more exciting toys while forgetting about the old. With some limitations, this attitude is fine in the world of commerce. However, it becomes a problem when we start using this framework to depict world crises.

Consider the current state of the world. Ukraine is still in the middle of an intense war against Russia, which has killed close to 70,000 Ukrainian troops in two years. Venezuela is erupting in protest as fraudulent election results gave the tyrannical Nicolás Maduro another term as president. Palestine is entering its eighth month of genocide as the death toll reaches 40,000 with no ceasefire in sight. Sudan is in the midst of a gruesome civil war, displacing over 10 million people—the largest displacement crisis in the world. But so what? What’s next?

See, the problem is that when we see headlines that depict conflicts like these, oftentimes we are tempted to treat them as another product—another eye-catching headline that will capture our attention until the next headline replaces it. This is a problem because when the new world crisis replaces the old, the old doesn’t go away. Those people’s lives don’t magically go back to normal such that the news can justifiably stop reporting about it. Sure, if someone stops caring about the old product, no one gets hurt. However, if we stop caring about the crisis reported six months ago, those people may never get help. And thus, the world may never get better.

Though it can be taxing to care about one or more ongoing crises for an extended period of time, dismissing them from our consciousness can have grave consequences for those suffering overseas. Consider the Sichuan Massacre or the Cambodian genocide or the Armenian genocide or the Holocaust. These are all historical examples of crimes against humanity that went largely ignored and resulted in millions of people losing their lives. Though at the time of these events, social media was largely nonexistent and censorship played a large role in concealing the reality. If the documented events had constant attention, speculation points to the possibility that there may have been greater pressure on these oppressive governments from international authorities to correct their ways, potentially saving millions more people from the same dismal doom.

Thus, it is our responsibility as dutiful citizens to pay attention to the old and the new. Doing so will require establishing a balance between staying informed about current ongoing crises and incorporating new ones into our memory bank. This will prevent us from falling victim to sensationalist attempts to grab our attention, only to completely change the topic of discussion within a few days. Breaking this consumerist mindset will be especially crucial to shifting the way we view world conflicts for generations to come.

From the streets of Gaza to the roads of Khartoum, these places host a plethora of cultural diversity and unique foods that should be explored by the rest of the world. However, when their people are in danger, this is not possible. It’s time to limit our consumerist outlook to products and pay better attention to our fellow humans worldwide. That being said, yes, I too am looking forward to seeing the new JoJo Siwa scrunchie collection!