You buy too much cheap clothes!

In recent years I have reduced my clothe shopping a lot, since originally I wanted to save money and I felt that I already own every piece of clothing I need for any occasion, so why would I have to keep piling the clothes?

I actually started to become super concious about the stuff I own and consume when I moved in to my first apartment in a different country. All my stuff and clothes were in a different country, so there was very limited stuff I could bring from my previous home, since I had to bring it through airplane and several trains. When I thought I was gonna move away from my new country again, I packed my bags and had to donate a lot of my stuff away that I had dragged all the way from my home country (I had brought more stuff everytime I visited my home country during my study years) a lot of stuff got thrown to the trash too, since no one wanted my ugly clothes and I had no space in my bags anymore. After this I have really admired simple life and I totally HATE clutter. It's really not the fact that "oh no, I had to throw away my stuff :(" that stuff was shit anyway! Why not just have the essentials all the time? Nowadays I always have only one bottle of shampoo, cream etc and use it all up before buying new. I used to have several bottles open at the same time and I bet I'm not the only female doing that. Now in our household only my boyfriend does that and I hate it haha sorry. Anyway that was the story of how I became to hate clutter and consumerism in general.

I wanted to talk about how everyone in the fancy countries buy too much cheap useless clothes!

So I watched this documentary called "The True Cost" which is telling the story behind all of our everyday clothes that you and me use and buy. Especially the cheap shit we buy from stores like H&M, Primark, Zara etc you know the ordinary mainstream stores. I thought everyone should know how exactly they are made! I know most of people know the horror stories of sweatshops in Bangladesh and China where the workers get paid 2 dollars a day and work crazy overtimes all the time, but there's actually a lot more horrific stuff behind it.

The most horrific thing to me was the cotton fields part, so I'll just try to write what it is in short and simple, since most people don't have time or interest to actually watch a long documentary about this.

Your clothes are made of cotton. Majority of the world's cotton fields are genetically modified (GMO) cotton fields, only a small percentage is organic cotton and that kind of clothes are super rare and expensive. There is a big seed company that patented the GMO cotton seed, so all of the cotton farmers have to always buy cotton seeds from that big company which has added 1400% more price to it. This brings the cotton farmers in to debt. This results in vast cotton farmer suicides! It's like, everyday a couple of cotton farmers kill themselves. Check the documentary for accurate numbers, I can't remember off the bat.

The villages around the cotton fields are affected too. Even though the seeds are GMO they need to be sprayed with tons of chemicals in order for the cotton to grow all year round and not only seasonally + grow faster and other mutant stuff. All of the villages around the fields have very high number of retarded children, mental illnesses, cancers, tumors etc all kinds of bad stuff, probably from all that chemical. The farmers themselves always die early from a disease like that.

And of course the terrible sweatshops, but that is a bit more common subject so I'll just leave it at that. There was actually just recently an incident in Bangladesh, where a garment factory was in a very bad condition. There was visible cracks everywhere in the building and the workers notified the factory owner, but he didn't give a shit. Then the building collapsed killing 1000 slave workers. :(

How can you as a consumer help? I don't know, these people have work thanks to this, but it's like slavery in my opinion. Those countries are poor as hell and you are lucky to have a job. I don't know if enough people in the consuming world can become aware and stop buying these cheap clothes, enough to make the big heads of the companies to take action, right now they only see dollar signs in their eyes. Did you know that every sixth person in the world works in some part of the clothing industry?

Here's me, consuming. Okay bye!