More thoughts on consumerism

“Even people who are not miserable to begin with may become spoiled and lost in mindless, obsessive consumption. That is what mindless and thoughtless people do when they become rich. They become mindless, thoughtless rich people.”
John R. Schneider. The Good of Affluence: Seeking God in a Culture of Wealth. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2002. p. 39.

If you don’t have interiority to begin with, getting and spending money to entertain yourself may only make you unhappier. That’s what I think that means.

It's because of a type of colonization. What's marketed to us invades our brains.

"...the search for self [has] always been shaped by marketing hype, whether or not [we] believed it or defined [our]selves against it. This is a side effect of brand expansion that is far more difficult to track and quantify than the branding of culture and city spaces. This loss of space happens inside the individual; it is a colonization not of physical space but of mental space."
Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 1999), p. 66. Quoted in Tom Beaudoin. Consuming Faith: Integrating Who We Are with What We Buy. Lanham, Md.: Sheed and Ward, 2003. p. 5.

READ: The Life and Death of the American Mall: The indoor suburban shopping center is a special kind of abandoned place. Atlas Obscura. Matthew Christopher. January 10, 2024

It's easily digestible. It becomes a comfort. It replaces other parts of ourselves that feel harder or more challenging, even if they would be more nourishing or are sometimes necessary.

"And over espresso on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, we agreed that the reason people got so crazy around Christmas was that they ignored the solstice, and just when they should be allowing themselves to be pulled into that primal sense of darkness they spaced-out at the peak of consumerism."
Thaisa Frank. A Brief History of Camouflage. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1992. p 142.

Of course, "Human life does not exist to serve the brand economy. The brand economy should serve human life and flourishing." (Tom Beaudoin. Consuming Faith: Integrating Who We Are with What We Buy. Lanham, Md.: Sheed and Ward, 2003. p. 67.)

It becomes a "consumption treadmill." (Michael Lerner. The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right. HarperSanFrancisco, 2006. p. 319.)

"Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not a new wearer of clothes." (Henry David Thoreau, "Economy," Walden)

Simply fleeing the influence of consumer culture doesn't avoid the problem, since "there's nothing more bourgeois than being afraid to look bourgeois." (Andy Warhol) The problem has to be solved on another level. Once exposed to the culture, it is part of us, and we have to confront it head-on.

That might mean deleting the influence. “The billboard needs no regulation and no planning — all it needs is abolition." (Benton McKaye, "To Keep Malignant Growths Off Our Highways," Boston Evening Transcript, Feb 21, 1928.) Notice: Not avoid the billboard, not pretend the billboard doesn't exist, but abolish the billboard. It's a change in our shared world we have to help bring about.

It's possible to change everything. You can literally just stop.

"I know several ladies in England who refuse to drink sugar in their tea, because of the cruel injuries done to the Black People employed in the culture of it at the West-Indies."
Quobna Ottobah Cugoano. "Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Humbly Submitted to the Inhabitants of Great-Britain." Published in Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery, and other writings. (1787-1791) Ed. Vincent Carretta. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. p. 102.

What we think of as normal has been created by someone. Some of these fictions can be seen through and dropped.

"...he [Santa Claus] used to dress in many different colors, until Coca-Cola's massive advertising budget helpfully clarified that he comes down the chimney only in their colors. That's right, the original war on Christmas was not fought by atheists but by American Protestants in the early colonial days who objected that only Papists would indulge in such a thing — and the various commercial accoutrements were gradually added on to make the holiday more palatable to them."
Greg Epstein. Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe. William Morrow, 2009. p. 199.

On the other hand, just stopping doesn't entirely shift the power balance in your direction.

"But as law professor and Master Switch author Tim Wu says, "The rise of networking did not eliminate intermediaries, but rather changed who they are." And while power moved toward consumers, in the sense that we have exponentially more choice about what media we consume, the power still isn't held by consumers."
Eli Pariser. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You. Penguin Press HC, May 2011.

It might mean a riot. I don't know.

"Urban rioting was merely the underside of American consumerism..."
Jim Wallis. The Call to Conversion: Why Faith is Always Personal but Never Private. Revised and Updated. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2005. (Originally 1981.) p 40.

See also: "10 'Successful' Reflections". It's a 4-minute read on Medium.

This is pretty terrible. Read the article and think about what goes into the products you're buying. www.nytimes.com/2024/12/20/w...

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— jeffgur.bsky.social (@jeffgur.bsky.social) December 20, 2024 at 9:55 AM

Quotes on therapeutic consumerism

Hannah Arendt:

"It is also true that there is a certain element of violence in the imaginative exaggerations of publicity men, that behind the assertion that girls who do not use this particular brand of soap may go through life with pimples and without a husband, lies the wild dream of monopoly, the dream that one day the manufacturer of the 'only soap that prevents pimples' may have the power to deprive of husbands all girls who don't use his soap.
"

Erich Fromm:

"This situation is still more emphasized by the methods of modern advertising. The sales talk of the old-fashioned businessman was essentially rational. He knew his merchandise, he knew the needs of the customer, and on the basis of this knowledge he tried to sell. To be sure, his sales talk was not entirely objective and he used persuasion as much as he could; yet, in order to be efficient, it had to be a rather rational and sensible kind of talk. A vast sector of modern advertising is different; it does not appeal to reason but to emotion; like any other kind of hypoid suggestion, it tries to impress its objects emotionally and then make them submit intellectually. This type of advertising impresses the customer by all sorts of means: by repetition of the same formula again and again; by the influence of an authoritative image, like that of a society lady or of a famous boxer, who smokes a certain brand of cigarette; by attracting the customer and at the same time weakening his critical abilities by the sex appeal of a pretty girl; by terrorizing him with the threat of “b.o.” or “halitosis”; or yet again by stimulating daydreams about a sudden change in one’s whole course of life brought about by buying a certain shirt or soup. All these methods are essentially irrational; they have nothing to do with the qualities of the merchandise, and they smother and kill the critical capacities of the customer like an opiate or outright hypnosis. They give him a certain satisfaction by their daydreaming qualities just as the movies do, but at the same time they increase his feeling of smallness and powerlessness."

Jim Wallis:

”If you just drink this beer, use this toothpaste, drive this car, wear this perfume, or buy these jeans, this can be your life, too. Is this not the essence of idolatry--a misdirected form of worship?

But these promises are an illusion, a mirage that is very dangerous. All of life has been reduced to consumption. We sacrifice our souls for the mirage of glittering images, and all we get is a mouthful of sand. We have run after mirages in the desert, and now the desert is in us.”

Sources

Hannah Arendt. The Burden of Our Time. London: Secker and Warburg, 1951. Published in the US as The Origins of Totalitarianism. p 336.

Erich Fromm. Escape from Freedom. New York: Avon, 1941. p. 149.

Jim Wallis. The Soul of Politics: Beyond "Religious Right" and "Secular Left". New York: Harvest, 1995. p. 168.

Quotes on seeking happiness through consumer power

Arthur Miller:

"Years ago a person, he was unhappy, didn't know what to do with himself, he'd go to church, start a revolution – something. Today you're unhappy? Can't figure it out? What is the salvation? Go shopping."

Isak Dinesen:

"Nowadays when people do not allow themselves to be burned or expelled from society for the sake of Paradise, it is not because our more refined nerves cause us to fear the stake or poverty or expulsion more than our forebears did, nor because we are in doubt that our sufferings will gain us entrance to Paradise – for in any case such a belief could easily spring up at any time at all – but because the Paradise that is promised us in connection with these sufferings does not appeal to us. We have no desire for it and would have no wish to go there even if access to it were free.

On the other hand, when people began to believe fervently that bliss was to be found in motorcars, a good cellar, and so on, then the majority were prepared to undergo frightful sufferings for years, in offices, factories and stock exchanges, in the hope of finally attaining that bliss. At this moment probably fifty percent of civilized humanity would be reconciled to enduring all the pangs of the early Christians if they knew they would emerge on the other side with an annual income of L$50,000 [$200,000 in 1923] for the rest of their lives, and so for them there is no reason to envy the victims of Nero – with eternal bliss in store for them – their strength of character."

Amitai Etzioni:

"Several studies have shown that, across many nations with annual per capita incomes above $20,000, there is no correlation between increased income and increased happiness. In the United States since World War II, per capita income has tripled, but levels of life satisfaction remain about the same, while the people of Japan, despite experiencing a sixfold increase in income since 1958, have seen their levels of contentment stay largely stagnant. Studies also indicate that many members of capitalist societies feel unsatisfied, if not outright deprived, however much they earn and consume, because others make and spend even more."

Michael Lerner:

"What spiritual wisdom teaches us is that happiness cannot be obtained through the accumulation of goods and that therefore creating a society whose highest priority is to stimulate endless consumption is a spiritual error."

Sources

Arthur Miller. Quoted on the "Sunbeams" page of The Sun, February 2006, p. 48.

Isak Dinesen [Karen Blixen]. On Modern Marriage and Other Observations (1924). Translated by Anne Born. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986. p. 36.

"Get Rich Now." Amitai Etzioni. Excerpted from The New Republic (June 17, 2009). Reprinted in UTNE Reader (Jan-Feb 2010), p. 39.

Michael Lerner. The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right. HarperSanFrancisco, 2006. p. 315.

Americans' dysfunctional relationship with shopping malls

Shopping for its own sake, not to buy anything necessary, is a kind of wealth destruction. Sam McKeen wrote:

...most Americans would consider potlatch feasts, in which Northwest Indian tribes systematically destroy their wealth, to be irrational and mythic but would consider the habit of browsing malls and buying expensive things we do not need (conspicuous consumption) to be a perfectly reasonable way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

There is an economic contradiction embedded in it. The economy needs people to spend. Yet, when consumers overspend, they burden themselves with debt and can spend no more, and the economic system falls to threads. In this way, shopping may destroy not only the individual's own wealth, but the entire nation's. David Segal wrote:

Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the crux of the problem: We are reliably informed that whatever part of the economic crisis can’t be pinned on Wall Street – or on mortgage-related financial insanity – can be pinned on consumers who overspent. But personal consumption amounts to some 70 percent of the American economy. So if we don’t spend, we don’t recover. Fiscal health isn’t possible until money is again sloshing into cash registers, including those at this mall and every other retailer.

In other words, shopping was part of the problem and now it’s part of the cure. And once we’re cured, economists report, we really need to learn how to save, which suggests that we will need to quit shopping again.

So the mall we married has become the toxic spouse we can’t quit, though we really must quit, but just not any time soon. The mall, for its part, is wounded by our ambivalence and feels financially adrift.

Like any other troubled marriage, this one needs counseling. And pronto, because even a trial separation at a moment as precarious as this could get really ugly.

Sometimes this wealth destruction ritual is carefree and contented, but other times it is driven by peer pressure and other external compulsions, or even worse, by an internal void. Jim Wallis wrote:

The poverty of middle-class life is a sign of the crisis. Our shopping mall culture keeps consumers busy in an age of hitherto-unknown materialism fraught with emptiness, loneliness, anxiety, and a fundamental loss of meaning. A most revealing sign of the crisis is the blank, sad, or angry looks in the eyes of the young who congregate both on thee wasting corners of urban streets and in the wasteful corridors of suburban shopping centers. But a moral focus on consumerism makes both liberals and conservatives uncomfortable, perhaps because both sides are so deeply caught up in it.

Malls present a facade of having everything under control. To sell brands, they must sell the double-edged idea of contentment: the consumer must be discontent and must buy the product to attain contentment. The mall is a place where this situation is clearly organized and the ansewr is easily achievable. Amy Fisher wrote:

Within these weatherless bubbles of artificial ease – the clothing shops, photo shops, shoe stores, bookstores, music shops, movie theaters, drugstores, and fast-food restaurants all lined up, open and welcoming, side by side – teenagers spent their weekends, spent their allowances, met and mated, got their first jobs. As malls organized suburban landscapes during the very same years that galloping recession, unemployment, and drug use were disorganizing suburban homes, it would strike more than a few social scientists as ironic that the more controlled and sheltered teenagers' public environments grew, the more challenged and chaotic their personal ones became.

Some people reach a point of inner peace where recreational shopping becomes irrelevant. Ann Brenoff wrote:

In any case, it [shopping] just stopped being fun and she just stopped doing it. I realized this past weekend that, at age 64, I may have reached this milestone myself. Truth is, the Great Recession stole the wind from my shopping sails and I never fully recovered it anyway. Walking around a crowded mall is far less appealing to me than walking down a hiking trail. And spending hard-earned money on things I don't really need and may not ever use is something I don't ever do anymore.
* * *
But it did get me thinking how shopping may indeed be something that we just grow out of – and that can occur at any age. When we leave it behind, we move ourselves to a healthier place. After all, why does anyone need to spend money on themselves for affirmation of their worth and value? And that's pretty much what sport shopping is. Out-growing your need to shop has less to do with no longer being able to find age-appropriate clothes and more to do with simply becoming comfortable with who you are, satisfied with yourself and what you already have.

Sources

Sam McKeen's Preface to Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox, Your Mythic Journey: Finding Meaning in Your Life Through Writing and Storytelling. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1989. p. xii. (This is a revised version of Telling Your Story, originally published 1973.)
"Our Love Affair with Malls Is on the Rocks." David Segal. New York Times. Jan. 31, 2009.
Jim Wallis. The Soul of Politics: Beyond "Religious Right" and "Secular Left". New York: Harvest, 1995. p. 9.
Amy Fisher, with Sheila Weller. Amy Fisher: My Story. New York: Pocket Books, 1993. p. 106.
Do We Ever Outgrow Shopping? Ann Brenoff. Huffington Post. March 20, 2014.

Mistaking consumerism for happiness

If asked directly, none of us would say that we expect consumer goods to meet all our wants and needs. Yet it's hard to avoid absorbing the insidious ideology of "feel-goodism" (a term used by Steven Hayes), the idea that we can and should feel good all the time. Hayes described feel-goodism's implications in this way: "If you consume the right products, eat the right pill, drink the right beer, drive the right car, you believe that you're not going to feel anything you don't like." He adds, "that is not the definition of a meaningful life, and...people know it." We know it, yes, but many of us are still lured into consumerism.

Yet in other ways, consumerism does tap into better definitions of a meaningful life. "That consumption has something sacred about it is obvious from the central position it now occupies," wrote Thomas Berry. Using nearly theological language, Vincent Vinikas wrote: "Advertising is process. It inundates us, and in its perpetual waking, it alters the store of accumulated shared experiences of a people." He meant that advertisements give us a sense of belonging to a group and they help transmit and preserve cultural memories. With a sense of humor, Jim Wallis more recently noted the "constant barrage of commercials that sound increasingly theological: 'Datsun Saves,' 'Buick, Something to Believe In,' 'Kmart Is Your Saving Place,' 'Keep That Great GM Feeling,' 'The Good News of Home Heating,' 'GE: We bring good things to life.'" Perhaps due in part to slogans like these, Rabbi Jamie Korngold was able to quip that our society teaches us only two ways of dealing with spiritual dissatisfaction: "1. Buy more stuff. 2. Buy more stuff."

Why do we mistake consumerism for a path to real happiness?

Here are a few reasons.

Psychological fulfillment imitating material fulfillment

Some products, such as food, really do meet essential needs. Others don't. Amitai Etzioni said that material consumption becomes the "social disease" of consumerism once we seek products to help us achieve "self-esteem and self-actualization." David Berreby made a related analysis that our innate, "bottom-up" thoughts tend to be simple and animalistic ("like the desire of each and every one of us to eat pretty often"), whereas our complex, cultural, "top-down" thoughts include things we "never felt until [we] saw a movie or heard a song on the radio." These thoughts, though culturally manufactured, may still have a powerful influence on our behavior.

Material fulfillment imitating psychological fulfillment

We are drawn to products not because they really make us happy, according to Alain de Botton, but because "expensive objects can feel like plausible solutions to needs we don't understand. Objects mimic in a material dimension what we require in a psychological one." Take, for example, the psychological needs of a political activist campaigning for her strongly held beliefs. Coming to understand, refine, and communicate one's beliefs takes a great deal of patience. Rabbi Michael Lerner pointed out that, in at least one instance, "the fact that movement activists expected instant [moral] transformation reflected the way in which they had themselves been shaped by the instant gratification ethos of the consumer culture." In reality, moral transformation requires introspection, time, and hard work.

The promotion of consumer goods, in its mimicry of psychological, spiritual, and moral fulfillment, confuses those eudaimonic pathways with mere hedonism. One may begin to believe that superficial pleasures are crucial to abiding happiness. Kathleen Norris describes the "perfect consumer" as one who has become "less able to distinguish between needs and wants, between self-indulgence and self-respect." Such a person may actually feel burdened by a modern convenience, such as a vacuum cleaner, that has become a "necessity." In this way, one fails to see the product as imitating the fulfillment of deep human needs, and rather begins to believe that the product truly embodies that fulfillment.

Envy

Sometimes we want something just because someone else has it. We might not want the actual thing, but we are frustrated by the idea that the other person is happier than we are, or that they have more wealth or status than we do, and that they are therefore somehow better, or perceived by others to be better. Envy's role in consumer society has been discussed by priest and activist Ivan Illich.

Imitating other's desires

Sometimes we do genuinely want what someone else has. Andrew McKenna wrote that the advertising industry is based upon a "single organizing principle of mimetic theory" which is that "desire is contagious." In other words, commercial products aren't always valuable and individuals don't always arrive at our own opinions — we just imitate everyone else's behavior.

Group identity

Sometimes we don't merely want to measure up against one individual; we want to join a group that is having a shared experience of the same product and that restricts membership based on that shared experience. If you want to feel like you belong and count among "smartphone users," for example, you have to buy and maintain a smartphone.

Racial and class identity

"When you are white," Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote, "there are very few triggers for feeling your whiteness...unless you feel your class." She cited the adage that poor people like to think of themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires." They may or may not realize that their economic status "isn’t what they thought it was." The situation is this: "White consumption responds to a deep psychological and social function. The white consumer is fighting for their very lives, as they experience them. If they are not consuming, then they may not exist as they imagine they exist: good, hard-working Americans that are one right decision removed from their rightful place of benevolent superiority." In other words, poor and middle-class white people like to imagine that they are very close to being rich; they essentially are rich people who just have to work a tiny bit harder, and the money will arrive any day now. Buying things, especially frivolous or luxury items, helps maintain that illusion. She concluded: "Consuming above your class position soothes the anxiety over white racial identity — what it means and what it might not mean."

“Like, why do so many lower income white people side with the Power Whites of the 1%," Stephanie Georgopulos asked, "instead of uniting with people who share their economic interests? Well, the concept of race was invented to prevent them from doing exactly that.” She explains: In the 17th century in Jamestown, there were indentured servants and slaves, and the masters feared that this oppressed class would grow too powerful if it included white people. So they began using fewer white servants and instead prioritized African slaves. The masters wanted poor white people to believe that they somehow partook of the privileges of rich white people. This indeed helped solidify the many privileges associated with whiteness; at the same time, whiteness alone never guaranteed anyone a good life. The racialized story told by the white masters was a lie. “When the color of your skin is packaged and sold back to you like a winning lottery ticket, of course you’re gonna be pissed when you can’t actually cash it in.” And furthermore, because racism is based on separation rather than connection, it frustrates human happiness. “The more a white person believes his skin entitles him to the best that life has to offer, the more meaningless his life becomes,” and likely “fail[s] to cultivate the actual skills needed to navigate the modern world.” White people already know and feel guilty about this, at least unconsciously. All this “time, money, emotion invested” into the lie of white supremacy amounts to a “sunk cost,” making them reluctant to give up the lie.

Based on an essay posted to Helium Network on Aug. 9, 2011. Helium went offline at the end of 2014.