Today (mostly in China but in many other parts of the world) it’s singles day.
Also known as 11:11 is an anti-valentine’s holiday to celebrate people who are unromantically attached where they buy themselves gifts to reward themselves or to present to themselves because they’re single and other people don’t.
Singles day is now officially the biggest online shopping day in the world; with the Chinese giant Alibaba reporting last year somewhere in the region of 90 billion dollars’ worth of sales on that day.
It’s what’s known as a synthetic holiday which is inserted into the calendar around lower yield shopping periods to increase consumption and increase revenue.
Think Black Monday or the extension of Halloween or everything for Easter coming out on the 2nd of January or the sales or the extension of valentine’s day etc etc etc.
It’s reported to have started in about 1993 in a Chinese university where students railed against a couple’s culture to celebrate being unattached and it went viral.
In the UK it’s celebrated on March 11th at the present time, so it doesn’t get in the way of Guy Fawkes and Halloween, but the rest of the world celebrate it on November 11th.
HT to Alex for showing me this yesterday and making me more aware but even more depressed about the fact that we are so malleable and so easily influenceable that we will give ourselves a reward on a day that we’re unattached which means buying something electrical or a pair of trainers or a handbag etc etc.
I think it’s great to be single, if single is how you want to be. I think it’s great to be married or to be polyamorous.
It’s fine to live how you want and with whom you want in whatever way you want in a consensual and accepting way but I’m just not sure that we need to buy hyper consumeristic electrical products transferred on a container ship to justify our decisions.
Blog Post Number - 3261