Capitalism
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
... See moretheconvivialsociety.substack.com • Ill With Want

Since the 1970s, productivity has grown at 3.5 times the rate of pay for American workers. Precarious employment has risen by 9 per cent since the late 1980s, and we have seen extraordinarily high levels of burnout in the workforce. In short, we are underpaid, insecure, and burned out. And yet the achievement society – with its injunction to be mor
... See moreAlec Stubbs • The Achievement Society Is Burning Us Out, We Need More Play
Thus, the ads mostly affected the people who were in a “deciding” mindset when those ads ran.
Richard H. Thaler • Nudge: The Final Edition
“We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal; We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.”
— Erich Fromm , “The Sane Society”