For nearly two decades, I got paid to test stuff. Road bikes. Running sneakers. Routers. My job was to sort through the excess and find the worthwhile.
I loved it. But I also hated it. It’s complicated. Isn’t everything?
Long before clicks became currency, I was a product editor at magazines that catered mostly to men with disposable income. They trusted us to tell them where to vacation, what to cook, and which bezeled dive watch or high-powered blender to buy. I oversaw a team of testers, assessed gear with journalistic rigor, and filled pages with lusty photographs of top picks.
This meant I was sent a lot of stuff. Dozens of boxes piled up by my cubicle every day, filled with Damascus knives, espresso machines, fishing poles, skis, wool socks. If it existed, I unboxed it.
I won’t lie: It was a fun gig. Because of course it was. How lucky was I? Working my way up the masthead, reviewing products, helping readers make informed decisions. I took it seriously and earned a solid reputation that eventually earned me the chance to oversee broader coverage.
If I had any uneasiness about all this back then, I was too busy to notice. I had deadlines to hit, higher-ups to impress, emails to answer. But looking back, I often feel a deep sense of shame and disgust. I think about the endless samples shipped to me, and the products I sent to far-flung testers.
Most of all, I think about the cycle of consumption product journalism normalized. Every year, we highlighted a must-have coffee maker or grill or phone, because the new version had a “game-changing” function. The subtext in all of this was a promise that this one thing would make a reader cool. Satisfied. Happy. And then we told them to buy something else.
Any low rumble of dread I felt I tried to justify as the natural push and pull of the work: On the one hand, I was helping people make informed decisions; on the other I was encouraging a culture of disposability—one that’s mutated rapidly since: We’ve consumed more resources in the last six years than we did in the entirety of the 20th century.
So many of us—myself included—have been trained to think that stuff is the answer to our problems, and that quick-fix thinking has perpetuated the myth that we can somehow shop our way out of the climate crisis.
Eventually, I stepped away from product journalism and helped build a few different things I was proud of. I focused on buying less in my own life. And I watched as site after site traded proper reviews for quickly thrown together “best of” lists, thousands of which popped up seemingly overnight, like mushrooms after a storm. These were designed to get people to buy products so a publisher could take a commission on the sale. (I’d be lying if I said I never put one together myself.)
I was so frustrated by all this that I told myself I wouldn’t go back to product writing full time. But I couldn’t escape stuff. An avalanche of unnecessary recommendations clogged my social feeds and my brain. I found myself thinking about what intentional consumption could look like in this new world of influencer-hocked Amazon “must-haves.” I wondered if it was even possible to review products without glorifying the always better, always new?
one5c asked that question, too. And now it’s my job to help an answer take shape. I’m thrilled to be here, but this work is tricky. So many of us—myself included—have been trained to think that stuff is the answer to our problems, and that quick-fix thinking has perpetuated the myth that we can somehow shop our way out of the climate crisis. But, if we’re telling people to buy less (or not at all), why are we also helping people understand what to buy?
Because the right tool for the job still matters—and always will. This is where my product-editor past comes in handy. When I’m working on a story and I feel the guilt creeping in, it helps me pause and really consider a category and whether our positioning of it is as honest as it can be. It’s now something of an ally, amping up my bullshit detector. It also informs how we talk to you all about the products we cover: We will tell you when a water bottle or food-storage bag is good, but also that the one you have is probably just fine, too. We also get that sometimes you’re gonna need stuff, so, in addition to performance, our process factors in durability, repairability, resource consumption, corporate ethics, and long-term value. And we don’t earn commissions on anything we recommend.
It’s a start. But I still feel a heaviness about the part I played in framing consumption as need. There’s no way to close that chapter. Maybe that’s the point. I should always have the pages open and read them as a reminder. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t there first. That’s a lesson. Here’s another: Sustainability is about responsibility, not perfection. It’s about recognizing your impact, even when it makes you wince, and trying to do better.
