Deep Reflection: —J'adore— The Quiet Death of Ritual #WriteCulture
What if the liquidation of a brand is not a market failure, but a cultural warning?
🖌️ The fall of Don't Call Me Jennyfer may seem like another business casualty: 130 stores, 1,000 jobs, one more name fading into retail oblivion. But beneath this economic surface lies a psychological rupture. Not a simple bankruptcy, but the slow erosion of retail as ritual, of adolescence as a public experience, of shopping as self discovery.
To lose a store is to lose a setting: a stage where identity is rehearsed, belonging is tested, and freedom is felt in the ordinary act of choosing who to become.
Now algorithms decide what we want before we do.
Temu and SHEIN do not sell clothes. They sell certainty: algorithmic premonitions wrapped in parcels.
"A chain of supply as opaque as it is efficient."
What Freud once called the uncanny finds its new home in logistics: familiar objects arriving from faceless origins, dissolving the boundaries between desire and design.
In this shift, human ambiguity is no longer tolerated. Adolescence, once a time of exploration and hesitation, is reduced to a predictable behavioural cluster. The shop assistant, once a guide through uncertainty, is replaced by metrics that track clicks, not confusion.
❖ The existential dilemma:
Are we still choosing, or merely conforming to predicted selves?
We mourn Jennyfer not just because it disappears, but because it was a place that allowed not knowing. A liminal space between childhood and adulthood. Between self and society. Between who we are and who we might become.
Psychoanalytically, this is more than nostalgia: it is grief for the symbolic container that held our inner contradictions. Without such spaces, individuation gives way to duplication. Culture becomes consumption. And freedom becomes a dropdown menu.
So the question is not: Can retail survive the algorithmic age?
The real question is: Can we survive without spaces that allow us to be undecided, unfinished, unscanned?
➤ A Gentle Invitation
As marketplaces vanish into apps and storefronts become fulfilment nodes, let us ask:
Where will the next generation go to become themselves?
Not every optimisation is an evolution. Some are acts of erasure.
—#WritingCulture— by Ellis Zeitmann @ThinkZeit
#DeepReflections #Psychoanalysis #Freud #ModernCulture #ExistentialThinking #WritingCulture #MindfulLiving #PhilosophyOfBeing #SlowTime #CreativeWriting #PoeticThinking