On the VALS Survey

Having just taken the VALS survey to determine what kind of consumer I am, I received a Primary Type of “Striver” and a Secondary of “Survivor”, which I’m told means that I’m primarily a person who really likes money and wants to be fashionable, and secondarily one who sticks only to favored brands and who thinks the world is changing too quickly. These are not accurate descriptions.

I don’t have any desire to appear wealthy, or to have a large amount of money. In fact, I can’t remember the last “big” purchase I made. I don’t own a television or car, my electronic devices are mostly obsolete by now, my music mostly comes from free distribution networks like Bandcamp and the FMA, most of the other entertainment I watch comes from webshows and podcasts, and I have no interest in appearing fashionable. The only thing I regularly pay for is food, and even that doesn’t cost much.

This all looks like a perfect opportunity to shift me to that “Survivor” designation, but even that’s untrue. It’s not that I consume cautiously, it’s that I try not to consume at all. I don’t trust labels, brands, and companies, not in the paranoid sense that I think they’re going to try to poison me, but in an ideological sense. I don’t want to be a mindless consumer, and I don’t want anyone but me to influence what I do and don’t purchase. It’s the principle of the thing: I’m the one piloting this life I have, and I’m not letting a bunch of garish logos and old white men in boardrooms steer me off course.

So, naturally, I don’t follow them on social networks, or know the major differences between competing ones, or feel particularly moved to go buy things by their advertisements. By any significant measure, the time I have to exist on this planet is incredibly short, and there are far more important things to do with that time than obsess over such superficial trivia as who endorses what shoe and which brand has fewer carbohydrates.

I’m sure that sounds incredibly self-important to some people, like I’m establishing my own superiority over the consumerist masses by saying that I’m oh-so-clever as to not bother with your paltry little systems. And that’s obviously not true. I’m not a feral child or a hermit, and I have to interact with companies constantly. The computer I’m writing on came from one, and so did my fridge, and so did the salt and pepper shakers I have. I might not use different brands with the same frequency as everyone else, but I do still need to use them.

The key difference is that I don’t find anything interesting about what brand I use. I’m not a member of the Coke Generation, I don’t define myself based on the fact that my mp3-player happens to be an Apple product, and I don’t treat my laptop as being more or less valuable because it has a name written on the back. At the end of the day, I drink cola because it tastes good, I use an mp3-player because I like music and radio theatre, and any laptop with a word processor, some storage and wireless internet access would suit my purposes pretty well. I don’t use any of these things to define myself as a person, just merely as devices fulfilling a function I’d like fulfilled.

In fact, the only material possessions I’ve really identified with are some cheap custom buttons I had made online, and a cheap trenchcoat I found in a thrift shop. That trenchcoat’s now ripped thanks to a rogue box of cat litter, and I hardly wear those buttons. Everything else I use is of purely practical value to me.

And, since the test is meant to explain how companies view me in order to show how they’d sell to me, how exactly would they get me to buy a product? The only time I’d buy their product is if I already required it and it was sufficiently nearby and cheap. No amount of advertising, endorsements or attempts at making it the cool, in thing would change that.

I suppose it would be possible to just bombard me with ads until the stars aligned and I needed a product they were offering, but that really would take too much money. I won’t pretend that I’m so culturally-steeled that I’m immune to all advertising, but it is mostly inconvenient for anyone to try selling me things. I don’t represent a customer at all, just a big empty space for brands to waste time and energy trying to get a profit from.

And I have to admit, a lot of this is just cyberpunk-mentality. From the word “go” I already don’t like companies, and I don’t want them faffing about in my business trying to ply their trades. As I’ve said, I have more important things to do than giving them attention and money.