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Comment by timthelion | Hacker News Reader

While I hate consumerism, I wonder why you say that it has caused our loneliness. Wouldn't it be possible to buy large numbers of board games, and other social goods while not becoming isolated? It actually seems to me that consumption is for the most part social. I mean, if I spend all day at home on reddit, what do I need to buy besides cereal and soylent powder? But if I'm going out all the time, I'll buy clothing to keep up with the local fashions, I'll buy wine to bring as a gift, ect. Even the constant home improvement, that basement cinema and the pool room, are initially understood as social purchases. "We need this patio so we can have parties." "I'm gona invite all my friends over and we'll play X-Box."

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Consumerism requires very high prioritisation of one’s career (as otherwise you won’t be able to afford all the nice stuff), which means working very hard, moving around the country/world for better jobs etc. This must come at the cost of friendships and family bonds.

I believe that it is actually unhappiness and loneliness which are the drivers of consumerism and not the other way around. I believe that happy people are lazy and I think that is why western civilization has outstripped the others. I think, that since our social bonds have been destroyed, we work hard to try to seek happiness that the other civilizations already have. And then our civilization spreads, like a disease, infecting other civilizations and making them unhappy and hardworking as well.

I think that this is a relatively new phenomena, which occurred during the urbanization caused by the industrial revolution. Urbanization caused social bonds to be broken, and people became unhappy and hard working.

There is a super creepy tshirt from one startup I know, which has the text "the pyramids were not built by happy people". I've always wanted to ask them about what this means. But I've never had the nerve.

But it has always haunted me.

> I believe that happy people are lazy

I’m now reading Marx’s “Grundrisse” and at some point, while he has just started explaining the essence of capital, he mentions the story of an English priest who on visiting the island of Jamaica complains that everyone in there is lazy, that they don’t want to work more in order to achieve more in life than just obtaining their daily food, and that was the way to disaster. When asked by said English priest on why they were working just enough to put some food on the table the Jamaicans answered him that there’s no reason for them to work more than strictly necessary, they’re happy with what they have.

Marx’s book was written in the 1850s so that I reckon that the English priest’s story dates from the early to the mid-1800s, i.e. when the Industrial Revolution was on full throttle in Britain.

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