I watch people run.
From my wheelchair outside the Tirana shopping center last November, I watched hundreds of people sprint through automatic doors at dawn, their breath visible in the cold air, their eyes fixed on discount signs glowing like promises. The sound—shoes slapping pavement, excited shouts, the electronic beep of opening gates—reminded me of footage I'd seen of wildebeest migrations. Urgent. Primal. Necessary.
But was it really necessary?
I'm Gerd, and I spend my days thinking about stars, science, and systems—how things work, why patterns emerge, what drives behavior across scales from neurons to galaxies. So naturally, I can't help but analyze Black Friday the way I'd analyze any other phenomenon: with curiosity, some skepticism, and an uncomfortable awareness that simple answers don't exist.
Here's what keeps me up at night: we're being manipulated, we know we're being manipulated, and we participate anyway.
The Dopamine Trap We Can't Resist
Your brain doesn't care about saving money. Not really.
What it craves is the feeling of saving money—that little electric jolt of victory when you see "-50%" flashing next to something you've wanted. According to research on shopping behavior, the moment you spot a discount, your brain releases dopamine the same way it would for food, sex, or survival resources. It's not rational. It's ancient.
The amygdala fires. The dopaminergic system lights up. You feel excitement coursing through your body.
And here's the thing that fascinates me as someone who studies complex systems: you're not actually responding to the discount itself, but to the anticipation of pleasure from getting that discount The actual purchase? That comes later, and it's almost always disappointing. The dopamine crashes. You're left holding a package and wondering why you bought a third pair of wireless earbuds.
I notice this in myself too. Sitting at my laptop, scrolling through Black Friday deals on equipment for our Free Astroscience programs, I feel my heart rate increase. My finger hovers over "add to cart." The countdown timer ticks. Only 3 left in stock.
That's the scarcity effect—another cognitive trap. When we believe something is rare or vanishing, we stop thinking critically. Our evolutionary software kicks in, the part that remembers when missing out on resources meant death, and suddenly we're no longer 21st-century humans making informed consumer choices. We're desperate primates grabbing whatever we can before the tribe takes it all.
The marketers know this. They've studied our brains more carefully than we have.
They've turned survival instinct into a sales strategy.
The Real Price Tag Nobody Shows You
Let me tell you what 400,000 tons of CO₂ looks like.
Actually, I can't. Nobody can. That's the problem.
According to research from the University of Leeds, that's roughly how much carbon dioxide gets pumped into the atmosphere just from Black Friday shipping in the United Kingdom alone And that's only the delivery trucks—the visible part. The professor who calculated this, Phil Purnell, noted that transportation emissions are "negligible compared to those emitted upstream and downstream of production": the real damage happens in factories we never see, in supply chains we never think about, in landfills we never visit.
I think about this every time I see a package arrive at our office. The cardboard box, the plastic bubble wrap, the styrofoam peanuts that scatter across the floor. Inside, a product that might last a year, maybe two if I'm lucky, before planned obsolescence or perceived obsolescence (they call it "psychological obsolescence" in the literature) tells me it's time to upgrade.
Only 12% of Italians are aware of the environmental cost hidden behind low prices I'm part of that 12% now, and honestly, the awareness feels like a curse sometimes.
Because once you see the system, you can't unsee it.
You start noticing that workers at Amazon, Macy's, and Zara strike specifically on Black Friday—the day these companies double their sales You realize the "abundance and glamour" associated with discount shopping exists in direct opposition to the actual working conditions of people making those products The fantasy advertised on your screen is built on someone else's exhaustion.
And then there's the waste. Up to 80% of plastic, textiles, and electronics purchased during Black Friday season will end up in landfills, incinerators, or low-quality recycling Things that still work. Gadgets that function perfectly. Clothes never worn, just... discarded.
I sit in my wheelchair and think: we're drowning in abundance while people work themselves to exhaustion to produce things we'll throw away.
Something fundamental is broken in this equation.
The Privilege of Saying No
But here's where it gets complicated, where my critiques slam into uncomfortable reality.
Not everyone can afford to be sustainable.
I learned this lesson properly a few years ago when a colleague criticized someone in our community for buying cheap fast-fashion during Black Friday. "Don't you care about the environment?" she asked. The person—a single parent working two jobs—just looked tired. "I care about my kid having a winter coat," she said quietly.
That moment changed how I think about all of this.
Because choosing to pay full price for ethically-made products, choosing to wait, choosing to "consume mindfully"—these are choices that require economic security. As one reflection on Black Friday puts it: "Choosing not to bend to the logic of consumption and paying the fair price for a product is also a privilege" many people, those massive Black Friday discounts aren't about mindless consumption. They're the only pathway to objects that everyone else takes for granted. A reliable laptop for online school. A decent winter jacket. Basic electronics.
I feel this tension in my own life. My wheelchair costs more than most people earn in six months. The adapted technology I need for my work—specialized keyboards, adjustable desks, accessibility software—these things are expensive. When they go on sale, should I feel guilty for buying them? Should the single parent feel guilty for finally being able to afford what her child needs?
The answer can't be that simple.
But neither can the solution be to surrender completely to a system designed to manipulate us. The data tells us that in 2013, over 80 million Americans spent $57.4 billion in a single day—that's the entire population of Germany shopping simultaneously. Those numbers don't reflect survival purchases. They reflect something else entirely: an engineered frenzy of accumulation.
So where's the line? How do we separate need from manufactured desire?
The Resistance Takes Strange Forms
There are people fighting back, and they're getting creative about it.
In Sweden, they created Circular Monday—the Monday before Black Friday, dedicated to reuse, recycling, and conscious consumption. There's Buy Nothing Day, which falls on the same day as Black Friday and encourages people to purchase nothing at all, forcing a moment of reflection I find something beautiful about that: a whole day of deliberate stillness in a culture that demands constant transaction.
Then there's Black Fridye, where people dye their old clothes black to give them new life It sounds almost ceremonial, doesn't it? Like a ritual of transformation. Taking something discarded and making it worthy again through nothing more than pigment and intention.
France launched Make Friday Green Again, promoting sustainable alternatives. There's Eco-friendly Cyber Monday, which flips the script on the Monday-after-Black-Friday online shopping spree by offering discounts only on sustainable products And Upcycled Thursday encourages creating new objects from recycled materials movements feel like small acts of rebellion. They won't topple the system overnight. They won't prevent the 429,000 tons of CO₂ that UK Black Friday shopping generates But they create cracks in the narrative, spaces where different stories can emerge.
I think about launching something similar through Free Astroscience—maybe a "Dark Friday" where we encourage people to turn off all unnecessary lights and look at the stars instead. To remember there are things beyond consumption. To recall that for most of human history, the greatest wonder available to everyone, rich and poor alike, was the night sky.
Free. Infinite. Unchanged by discount codes.
What Your Brain Does After the High
The morning after Black Friday, something predictable happens: regret.
Psychologists call it "post-shopping blues" or cognitive dissonance—the mental tension that emerges when your actions don't align with your values. The dopamine that spiked during purchase crashes hard. You're left staring at boxes and asking yourself: Did I really need this?
Your brain tries to rationalize. "It was such a good deal." "I would have bought it eventually anyway." "Everyone else was doing it." These are the stories we tell ourselves to resolve the discomfort.
But here's what interests me from a neuroscience perspective: that regret is actually functional. It's your mind's way of learning from excess, of calibrating future behavior. The problem is that by next November, when Black Friday rolls around again, the lesson has faded. The dopamine system resets. The cycle repeats.
We're stuck in a loop between ancient brain wiring and modern marketing manipulation.
From my wheelchair, observing crowds and studying patterns, I sometimes wonder if we're conducting a species-level experiment we don't fully understand. What happens to a brain evolved for scarcity when it's subjected to constant manufactured abundance? What happens to values formed over millennia when they're bombarded by thousands of targeted ads per day?
We're finding out in real time, and the preliminary results don't look promising.
The Questions We're Not Asking
Here's what troubles me most about the whole Black Friday phenomenon: we've stopped questioning the fundamental premise.
Why do products need such massive markups in the first place that 50% discounts are still profitable? If a luxury bag costs €100 to produce but sells for €4,000, and the "discounted" Black Friday price is €2,900, who's really getting the deal? The brand still makes enormous profit, but we feel like winners for "saving" €1,100 on something marked up 2,900% from production cost.
It's a magic trick. The discount distracts from the markup.
And when we participate in this system, even with the best intentions, we're voting with our money for a world where production is cheap (meaning labor is exploited), materials are disposable (meaning environmental costs are externalized), and psychological manipulation is considered normal business practice.
I'm not saying I have clean hands here. I don't. My laptop, my phone, my wheelchair components—all of them emerged from supply chains I'd probably be horrified to examine closely. My Free Astroscience programs use technology built on the same systems I'm critiquing.
But recognizing complicity isn't the same as accepting it as inevitable.
What if we treated Black Friday like a public health issue? After all, it exploits known vulnerabilities in human psychology, creates measurable environmental harm, and contributes to labor exploitation. We regulate other industries that cause harm. Why not this?
What if retailers had to display the true environmental cost next to every price? Not just the discount, but the carbon footprint, the water usage, the working conditions. Would that 50% off still feel like such a bargain when you saw the full accounting?
What if instead of engineering scarcity with countdown timers and "only 2 left!" warnings, we engineered transparency?
What I'm Choosing to Do
I can't fix Black Friday. I can't dismantle hyperconsumerism. I'm one person in a wheelchair running a small science education organization in Albania.
But I can make choices, small and imperfect as they are.
This year, when Black Friday rolled around, I gave myself a rule: wait 72 hours before purchasing anything non-essential. The delay breaks the dopamine cycle. It gives my prefrontal cortex time to catch up with my amygdala. Sometimes the desire passes completely. Sometimes I still want the thing, but at least the decision is more deliberate.
I'm also starting to track consumption differently. Not just money spent, but items acquired. Each purchase logged with a simple question: six months from now, will I remember I bought this? If the answer is probably not, I don't buy it.
For Free Astroscience, we're planning that "Dark Friday" event I mentioned—turning off lights, reducing consumption for one evening, looking up instead of at screens. It's symbolic more than practical, but symbols matter. They mark the boundaries of what we consider normal.
And I'm having more conversations like this one. Honest, uncomfortable conversations about privilege and access, about manipulation and choice, about the difference between needs and manufactured desires.
Because staying silent feels like consent.
Where We Go From Here
The prediction for this year's Black Friday is that Italians will spend between €238 and €272 per person. Multiply that across millions of people, across dozens of countries, and you get a staggering monument to consumption.
But monuments can be dismantled. Systems can change. Not easily, not quickly, but they can.
I think about the alternative movements growing in Europe—Circular Monday, Buy Nothing Day, Black Fridye. They're small now, but so was every significant change at the beginning. The fact that 31% of U.S. consumers now refuse to buy from brands that don't commit to diversity, equity, and inclusion, rising to 37% among Gen Z and underrepresented communities suggests that consumer behavior is shifting.
People are waking up. Slowly, imperfectly, but genuinely.
What gives me hope, sitting here in my wheelchair watching the world sprint past, is that awareness itself is a form of resistance. Every person who learns about the dopamine manipulation, the environmental costs, the labor exploitation—that's one more person who might hesitate before clicking "buy now." One more person who might ask better questions. One more person who might imagine different systems.
The stars I study at Free Astroscience operate on timescales that make human problems seem brief and trivial. But they also remind me that even the most stable-seeming systems eventually transform. Stars burn through their fuel and become something else entirely.
Maybe that's what we're witnessing with Black Friday—the late-stage burning of a consumption-based economy that's running out of fuel, preparing for whatever comes next.
I don't know what that next phase looks like. But I know it won't arrive through individual shopping choices alone. We need systemic change: regulations on psychological manipulation in marketing, true-cost accounting that includes environmental and social impacts, labor protections that give workers power to negotiate.
We need to redesign the system, not just make better choices within it.
The View from Here
From my wheelchair, I see patterns other people miss. I have time to observe, to think, to notice the small contradictions that reveal larger truths.
And here's what I see about Black Friday: it's not really about shopping. It's about meaning-making in a world that often feels meaningless. It's about control in lives that feel uncontrollable. It's about belonging to something, even if that something is a collective frenzy of acquisition.
The real question isn't "should we participate in Black Friday?" The real question is "what are we trying to fill?"
Because no discount, no matter how deep, can satisfy a hunger that has nothing to do with objects.
I watch people run toward deals and discounts, and I understand the impulse. I feel it too. But I also wonder what we might discover if we ran toward something else instead—toward connection, toward creativity, toward the dark sky full of stars that's been waiting for us all along.
Free and unchanged by any marketing campaign.
That's the real abundance. That's what I'm choosing to remember.
As I roll my wheelchair home through the quiet streets after the shopping frenzy ends, I look up. The stars are still there, patient and indifferent, shining the same light that's traveled years to reach us. Ancient light meeting modern eyes. A reminder that some things exist outside the logic of consumption.
And that, at least, feels like hope.
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