The Consciousness of Consumerism: A Morning of Spray Bottles and Irony

This morning, I encountered a perfect example of how our current system, rooted in outdated thinking, creates absurd and wasteful situations—this time, involving spray bottles. My girlfriend asked me to help her remove the cap from a Great Value Glass Cleaner bottle. We also had four empty bottles, two of Lemon Scent Multi-Purpose Cleaner. I’m 6'1?", 230 lbs, and I’ve got the strength to match, meaning I should be able to easily remove the lid off of just about any jar or bottle—I'm the person who gets asked to open stuff. Yet, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t get the cap off any of the bottles. Closer examination revealed these bottles were deliberately designed to be disposed of: any attempt at removing the cap results in its probable destruction. The irony? I had purchased the Great Value Glass Cleaner refill bottle, assuming I could simply refill the original spray bottle. But no—the bottles were deliberately designed to be non-refillable.

These bottles, which share the same durable sprayer design as their lemon-scented bleach multi-purpose cleaner counterpart, could easily last through many refills. But they were specifically engineered with one feature: a cap that you can’t remove without excessive force. What’s worse, these bottles are sold right next to their refill bottles—products literally branded for refilling! This isn't just frustrating; it's absurd. It’s as though the system itself is mocking us, selling solutions to problems it deliberately created.

When I decided to purchase cheaper, “refillable” spray bottles to avoid this hassle, I discovered they barely work. I’ve bought them multiple times, and each time they failed almost immediately. We’re stuck in a cycle where the solutions offered are worse than the problem they claim to solve.

This isn’t just about convenience—it’s about the way our collective consciousness has become trapped in a paradigm of short-term thinking and deliberate obsolescence. It’s a metaphor for the larger systems that govern our world today, which create problems only to sell us inadequate solutions, all while depleting resources and creating waste.

The good news is this is the moment when we start waking up to these absurdities because I've sure noticed it. I want to change. I want there to be no need to make a bottle deliberately disposable. If we’re going to move forward as a species, we need to replace this outdated mode of thinking with a new consciousness that values sustainability, intention, and long-term thinking—even in something as small as a spray bottle.

And maybe, just maybe, we can all avoid the strain of trying to unscrew the cap from a bottle that was never meant to be opened in the first place.

And oh yes, PayloadNuke is one of my primary purposes in this life.