Gloss or sauce? Is Rihanna making fun of you?

We get it. We don’t deserve nice things. Us spendaholics deserve to have our hands rapped, like primary schoolers who’ve swiped the teacher’s mobile phone.

Because the tomato box is a collaboration with MSCHF, the Brooklyn-based guerilla company behind other viral limited-release products that poke fun at our urge to consume, like the USD $76,000 Birkenstock sandals made from reclaimed Hermes Birkin bag leather.

But, c’mon. If we’re going to dream up crazy inventions to spend our hard-earned cash on, we can do better.

Imagine if the simple act of scrolling Instagram helped you learn about the cosmos. Every time you watched a reel of someone’s outfit of the day – bam! – you’d be one step closer to understanding how black holes work.

Or, what if instead us nudging us towards divorce court, the petty stuff we do to our partners when they’ve done us wrong earned us points for creativity? For instance, that moment your partner’s booked a second trip away that month, and you tell your kid, “Go ask dad to help you with that model plane, he told me he’d love to help”. You could redeem those creativity points later for four instances of your partner putting the kids to bed, solo.

The pinnacle, naturally, would be getting paid to do the ultimate dream job: applying pressure to a deck chair. One minute your back is easing into the plastic weave of the banana chair, the next, you’ve contributed one unit of energy to power your city’s lights.

Would we all be better off looking at the ocean, every time we feel that nicotine craving to disassociate from our broken relationships and ticker tape roll of responsibility? Instead of trolling the internet to buy something that makes our breath turn shallow and puts our mind in a trance?

Well, duh.

But for most of us on many a day, that ship has sailed.

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Environmental collapse, racial injustice, and politicians arguing over whether a 10-year old American rape victim should have the opportunity to experience the “benefit of having the child” have made us weary.

As Pulitzer Prize-nominated author Rebecca Makkai recently put it, “Does anyone have a solid alternative to ‘Hope you’re doing well’ at the start of an email? It feels almost hilarious to use at this point, like saying it to someone you pass in a burning building.”

And, I’d add, let us shop without feeling like we’re being unwittingly ushered on to the set of Jackass. It’s been a rough couple of years.

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