Cultural distress (and consumerism)

In a recent newsletter, “The Shopping Cure,” Anne Helen Petersen explored the compulsion to buy and accumulate stuff that’s been fostered by technologies of frictionless consumption. Every conceivable activity or hobby one sets out to enjoy becomes an occasion to buy stuff: “They transform from sites of actual pleasure and diversion to means of sel

Economists say America transitioned from a manufacturing-based to a consumer-based economy in the 1950s. That means our society depends on discontentment; on people buying more and more of what they desire not merely what they need. During WWII the government severely restricted public consumption of certain goods needed for the war effort. Followi

what if our distress is a perfectly normal response to a society that’s lost its way? What if unfettered capitalism is making us sick?

Because the fear conjured by marketing is ultimately an illusion, what such marketing promises to deliver is also an illusion. And because it can never deliver, using fear in marketing can never build loyalty, connection or trust. And when these precious things are absent in a society, we become dissociative, cynical, apathetic and unhappy souls, w

Consumer culture promises us that we can buy our way out of pain—that the reason we’re sad and angry is not that being human hurts; it’s because we don’t have those countertops, her thighs, these jeans. This is a clever way to run an economy, but it is no way to run a life. Consuming keeps us distracted, busy, and numb. Numbness keeps us from becom

Capitalism thrives on bad feelings, on the knowledge that contented people buy less—an insight the old American trade magazine Printers’ Ink stated bluntly: “Satisfied customers are not as profitable as discontented ones.”4 Consumer society thus capitalizes on the very insecurities it produces, which it then prods and perpetuates, making us all ins