This story was first published in 2024 – but Black Friday just keeps on happening, no matter how much it makes our brains fizz, so it has been updated for 2025.
It’s the most beautiful time of the year, when just about every website on the internet is directing you to Black Friday round-ups. No judgement: these listicles keep the lights on for those publications and the people working for them. But that’s not how we do things here at Escape Collective, because there’s a conflict inherent in it: what seems as a genuine editorial recommendation is all too often a trojan horse with advertising and affiliate links lurking within.
There are broader ethical considerations than just editorial independence, too. We live in a world where overconsumption is out of control, with ever-widening gaps between the richest and the poorest. The profit-engorging lessons from the fast fashion industry have spread elsewhere. There’s less friction in the buying experience, less consideration, less patience, and always more more more stuff to buy.
Black Friday is maybe the key monument to this: a day where huge companies make huger amounts of money, small companies feel increasingly pressured to slash their already thin margins, and consumers are sucked into the vortex. There are winners and losers in this – I just don’t think it’s the little guys, or the people who actually have to make or deliver the products.
Now, everyone has to look out for themselves – and if you are in the market for a new rain jacket or bike computer or pump or whatever, this is probably a great time to do that. And that’s fine! But around this time of year, it also sometimes can’t help feeling like all these listicles and sales and never-to-be-repeated savings are calibrated to numb you into a kind of compliance, scrolling feverishly in search of a bargain for something you maybe, if you think about it, don’t even really need. And after the dopamine hit comes the crash.
If that’s sounding a bit like you or those around you this Black Friday, here’s a little listicle of our own to maybe help bring you back from the brink.
1. Go for a bike ride
If you’re in the US, you’ve probably just spent Thanksgiving Day with those you love (and maybe those that you don’t), searching for the gleaming core of friendship and family at the bottom of a plate overflowing with food. You’ve cooked; you’ve cleaned; you’ve fallen asleep on the couch. It has been A Big Day. The day after, you wake to a quiet house and a day of possibility.
You could head to the nearest megamall to be assaulted by bright lights and a different pop song blasting from every storefront all at once, and kids screaming in trolleys while their parents wrestle with strangers over cut-price Nutribullets. You could lose a morning staring at a computer screen, credit card at the ready, comparing best-ever deals. Or you could grab your bike and go for a ride: short or long, hilly or flat, none of that really matters. Turn your legs, feel the air fill your lungs, and for the time you’re out there, just be.
2. Patch some tubes
Did we do a good job with this story?
