If you just buy a guitar and get good enough to play songs and sing along and you never have a desire to sell or commodify your talents, then hell yeah. You’ve consumed a single thing one time and that act of consumption was a net good.

The reality is that this is not how most people consume guitars. You get a guitar and you’re going to want a strap and picks and maybe an acoustic pickup or a cable and an amp. And people are advertised new guitars and encourages to browse catalogues of hundreds of guitars. And people will build pedalboards or buy plugins or buy parts to do mods. And if you follow any bands those bands will start plugging their own side projects with custom guitars or amps or whatever.

And then once you get good you’re supposed to write songs or play in bands. You tell people you play guitar and they will ask, “do you have any stuff I can listen to?” or “maybe I could come watch you play sometime”. They expect you to produce things for them to consume. I play guitar as a form of meditation and telling people that I don’t release any of the music I write usually makes them confused.

I’m not saying people wanting to come watch a local band is bad. It’s cool. Support locals artists and all that. We live under capitalism and they need to live. But to say that buying a guitar is not meaningless consumption is beside the point. All of the bullshit consumption attaches itself to more meaningful consumption. The basic necessities to play some tunes are very meaningful. But there is so much bullshit piggybacking on that initial purchase that is heavily encouraged socially