We are constantly flooded with so much, all the time: with access to our friends’ location every second of every day, with the trends of the hour, with 15-second sound clip after 15-second sound clip, with all of the products we have been slowly convinced to buy.

This volume’s issue of The Stanford Daily Magazine calls into question how we consume: media, drugs, alcohol, friendship, fashion, art and identity? What does it mean to consume meaningfully? What does it mean to create? What are the bounds of consumption? What can we not optimize, package or sell?

Here, we examine consumption not just as a habit, but as a force. How has consumption encroached on us and the world: on the environment, on art, on our ability to give thoughtfully, to create meaningfully, to sit down and just think? How might we engage with the world slowly, intentionally and authentically?

We aim to sit with the tensions of modern consumption: the comfort and emptiness of online life, the intimacy and performance of identity, the allure of excess and the desire to detach from it. We question not only what we are consuming, but what is consuming us.

Rebecca Louie ’27 & Audrey Tomlin ’28

Vol. 269 Magazine Editors