Suffering For Sale

Society
Written By Jeff from End of a Species

Your End Times Shopping Guide

There was a simpler era when pain didn’t need an app. Grief existed without metrics. Now, your agony must produce analytics, because if suffering isn’t quantified, capitalism yawns.

Modern civilization operates under a simple creed: “If we can’t track it, it never happened. If we can’t sell it, who cares?” Uncounted suffering gets tossed into the category marked Miscellaneous.

Yet despair not, dear consumer. While institutions ignore your distress, enterprising minds have already developed products to gently accompany your existential dread.

Below you’ll find a selection of civilization’s least acknowledged pains, thoughtfully paired with items to ease, ignore, or monetize them. No pain is too abstract for a retail solution.

Eco-Grief

The Planet’s Collapsing—Grab a Coloring Book!

It begins quietly: the bees vanish, the forests thin, and wildfire haze becomes just another seasonal forecast. Then come the mega-storms, the triple-digit winters, the coastlines that creep inland year by year. You feel it in your bones, a kind of grief not attached to a person but to everything.

You try to talk about it, but you sound unhinged at brunch. You don’t cry at funerals anymore. You cry during recycling commercials. Your therapist tells you to focus on what you can control, like your breathing. Your breathing smells like ozone.

“Eco-grief” isn’t officially in the DSM, so it doesn’t qualify for insurance coverage. But take heart. The market is listening.

Suggested Products:

Undocumented Labor

Invisibly Cleaning Your Floors and Your Conscience

They clean the hotels, prepare the food, sew the garments, pick the fruit. They exist in policy loopholes and tax documents labeled "Other." Their work is essential; their humanity, negotiable.

They disappear from public records, but not from supply chains. Their injuries don’t trigger investigations. Their deaths don’t warrant headlines. And when we say “labor statistics,” we don’t mean them. Because if they’re counted, someone has to care.

But innovation marches on. With automation and outsourcing, you can maintain convenience and plausible deniability in one easy bundle.

Suggested Products:

  • Amazon: Home Assistant Robot
    This Wi-Fi-enabled helper cleans efficiently while preserving your ability to pretend exploitation is a thing of the past. Just like your history books.

  • EoaS Merch: X. Nihilo “Survived the Sim” Mug
    For sipping something hot while pretending you’re not complicit

Disposable Income Myth

Statistical Comfort for a Statistically Impossible Life

They say the economy is strong. Unemployment is low. Wages are up. But you’re skipping breakfast to pay for groceries and asking Google whether you can cook with expired eggs. Again.

That “average household income” they keep quoting? It’s being carried on the back of people whose tax returns look like bank heists. You are not average. You’re submerged, holding your breath beneath a surface that never rises.

Financial literacy is treated as a cure-all, like if you just downloaded the right budgeting app, you too could afford housing, healthcare, and heat at the same time.

Suggested Products:

Cultural Extinction

Heritage, Now Available on Subscription

Languages vanish. Oral histories fade. Rituals shrink into Instagram reels. The legacy of whole peoples gets turned into branding. Once, a story was passed down through generations. Now it’s printed on tote bags.

Your culture is vibrant, but only when it’s profitable. It gets boiled down into “aesthetic” for someone else’s dinner party. They don’t know the words, but they love the vibe. They’ll wear the embroidery without reading the history.

And when a tradition is fully stripped of meaning, it becomes content.

Suggested Products:

Datafication of Self

Monitor Your Existential Crisis in Real Time

You’re not tired, you’re noncompliant with your wellness protocol. You’re not sad, your serotonin metrics are just underperforming. You don’t need meaning. You need a notification that tells you when to hydrate.

Every part of you is quantified. Every hour is categorized. You don’t know how you feel until your tracker tells you. Your rest must be productive. Your joy must generate returns.

And if you fail to optimize your existence, the app will notify you. Kindly. Firmly. Repeatedly.

Suggested Products:

Health Care’s Hidden Math

Sick, Tired, and Spreadsheeted

If you’re not dying quickly, you're not billable. Chronic suffering without a diagnostic code becomes decorative. Invisible illnesses confuse the algorithm, and confused systems default to denial.

Healthcare used to mean healing. Now it means prior authorization, network coverage, and matching codes to feelings you can’t pronounce. Your symptoms must be translated into CPT codes or they cease to exist.

But don’t worry: comfort can be found. Not in care, but in products adjacent to it.

Suggested Products:

X. Nihilo’s Pick:

"Grief became a lifestyle. Ordered two. Didn’t fit."

Conclusion

In a world that demands your pain show up with receipts, maybe the real luxury is being allowed to hurt at all. The rest of us? We get merch.

You can’t file a claim for existential dread. There’s no hotline for dying ecosystems or commodified culture. But there are things to buy. And that’s almost the same.

So wrap yourself in fleece. Label your envelopes. Hydrate when your ring tells you. And scroll. Always scroll.

Shopping won’t save you. But it will distract you long enough to make it feel like maybe, just maybe, it’s all going to be okay.

That’s the algorithm’s promise. And it’s in stock now.

Disclaimer

This post contains Amazon affiliate links (because even the end times need passive income), official End of a Species merchandise (because satire is more fun in a hoodie), and one Etsy product made by a friend of the void (support small business before the grid fails). None of this will save you. Some of it might comfort you. All of it funds the broadcast from the burning ship.

Scroll responsibly.

Jeff from End of a Species

Jeff is one of the co-founders of End of a Species.

He hosts the End of a Species podcast, where he shares his takes on topics from a philosophical perspective, while making fun of almost everything he sees.

https://www.tiktok.com/@zeusnjeff
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