C.H.A.O.S. Mindset: How many clothes does a human need in their closet?
Black Spyday vs. Black Fr*day
Every now & then we do an open call on IG for burning reader questions — we treat the most compelling Qs to our infallible wisdom, then share the profound results…
Today we’re tackling 2 questions thematically connected to “Black Fr*day”… A day when multifarious forces assemble to try & whip you into a mindless copping frenzy — but you are stronger than that, baby!!
“Who’s got the recon on popping black fr*day/ cyb*r Monday deals to look out for?” — Jack Schulte
One of our Mach 3+ Cla$$ified SpyFriends posted this in the Spytalk chat room the other day, and it’s a great question — who doesn’t want to know about fire deals, especially fire deals Spy Nation is stoked about ??
But this will be the 2nd year running that we give Black Fr*day / Cyb*r Monday a miss. We like to conceive of BBSP as a weird oasis that’s connected to the consumer culture (we are, after all, a sletter about dope joints), and yet exists meaningfully apart from that culture at its most abjectly Pavlovian.
So even though many brands and stores that we love are gonna offer big $avings this weekend, it would make us feel too W*recutter-y to do a dedicated sale round-up / a.k.a. it would make us feel like SLAVISH SERVANTS TO THE GRINDING GEARS OF COMMERCE ...
Instead, we’re going to swing to the other extreme and unveil a new profound Black Spyday mindset as a corrective to Black Fr*day mania. We’re calling it:
“Cop Hardly Anything on Sale” (C.H.A.O.S.) Mindset.
Like most profound Blackbird Spyplane Mindsets, C.H.A.O.S. Mindset isn’t a strict blanket prescription for how to live, but rather a powerful horizon-expanding tool to help U see things in a different light. (Originally I wanted to go with the bolder “Cop Nothing on Sale” Mindset but that was too hyperbolic and also the acronym “C.N.O.S.” is not good.)
To be clear, it’s obviously tight to find a pricey garment you were coveting at a heavily reduced price.
BUT our problem is that this is not always (very rarely?) how sales actually go. Rather, Black Fr*day can feel like a dispiriting trip to an outlet mall where you try to convince yrself that you’ve found an underpriced gem not because it’s true but just so you can participate in “The Theater of the Bargain.”
Some brands actually manufacture sub-par s**t expressly to carry in their outlet stores, i.e. not only mids clothes but fraudulent mids clothes that never went to actual retail — but that’s another topic entirely.
You’ve been to the kind of outlet we’re talking about (real talk, it’s true of like 99.9% of them), and you’ve seen the equivalent Black Fr*day Sale selection — an assortment of mids / goofy / unappealing pieces that you and a bunch of other people did not buy when they were full price but which suddenly become structurally appealing when repackaged as part of this corny / coercive National Weekend-Spanning Celebration of Savings…
Put another way, marketers would love for us to ignore the question of our actual desire (or lack thereof) for a jawn and get caught up in the rote desire to “score a great deal,” detached from the actual content of the deal in question. In this twisted mentality, you find yourself saying, “Oh baby, for 72 precious hours this shirt that I did not want costs 25% less than it did the other day — I better move fast!!”
This is a textbook “false economy” — one that applies to all kinds of sales — but that’s surprisingly easy to lose sight of.

Whereas the Mach 3+ jawns enthusiast whose brain has been subjected to C.H.A.O.S. Mindset knows that if you “got a great bargain” on something you didn’t really want, you played yourself by dropping bucks … on something you didn’t really want!
“How many jawns does a human need in their closet?” — @Hobiecatmeow