Do We Have Victorians to Thank for Consumerism?
lithub.com
lithub.com
IIRC these are all freely available on the Internet Archive. Or, they used to be.
With that proviso, I recommend the first two segments for anyone who strives not to be a modern idiot.
When it was confined to the elite such excess was to be called a virtue outside of times of open rebellion (which almost always lost and would return to the status quo). Having plenty of extra rooms and great halls in case of guests is befitting of your station but to have extra chairs stored away for guests and it is a vice! But when lower classes catch up in a luxury it becomes passe unless there is something to upsell! If 'nominally lower' mercantile classes end up moving beyond them then it is outright immorality.
> “The late seventeenth-century invention of shops and shopping by an urban middle class who lived by trade was mirrored by the growth of a new type of domestic space,” Worsley writes. “What might be termed the ‘middle-class’ living room was full of superfluous objects, chosen for ornament rather than use yet cheap and not truly beautiful: a barricade of possessions intended to stabilize a precarious position in the world.”
It kind of reminds me of a famous watch Youtuber who berates anyone who wastes their money on a watch that costs more than a Casio, but less than a Rolex.
Long story short, people want to distance themselves from the class below them, and mimic the class above them.
The strategy that emerges is to appropriate the culture of people two classes below them, because people one class below them can't.
If you're rich and do poor people things, you set yourself apart from middle class people, who doesn't want to be mistaken for poor people. No one will mistake you for a poor person anyway.
Consumerism is reading articles such as these, and reading comments afterwards. It's natural, as humans are curious and want to experience things.
Though I can't quote anything I have a suspicion that this is written somewhere in the bible or by aristotle. it's human nature but also animal nature to be consumers.
Consumption has many reasons. some buy unnecessary things to build on other things. People who buy a boat or vacation envision sharing it with their friends.
People who buy the latest too envision building amazing things of high quality for people, or they see themselves doing something in less time.
People who buy things also invent other things. The world gets more complex. it's not that mysterious and has little to do with the victorian age, other than maybe it was actually documented. It's a shame to lay blame on a particular people of an era, as the sole originator of something that's subjectively called "bad" just because those people happened to be the ones who actually wrote down what they did for the future to learn from.
Consumption. Think about it. The victorian age? Tryu harder. Why do you think throughout history, kings had huge feasts and dozens concubines. Because they had the time and the opportunity.
oh, you aren't talking about Melbourne. Carry on.
With the internet, we should have some examples of production of accomplishable disciplines scaling in the same way that production of acquirable objects scaled. I can't think of examples off the top of my head, however. Arguably, modern languages?
Accomplishments autoscaling with tech and precedent has been there for a while, transalatic or transpacific navigation going from heroic to routine.