> Now it is my time to consume
What a sad state of affairs. New generations completely internalised the fact that living = consuming goods and traveling (or more accurately consuming travel destinations).
> The new generation that grew up in a very stable, rich world and had everything suddenly realises that they do not need consumption and hence talks noble things.
This should be a warning rather than a motivation. We fucked up and realised consumerism is hell, now you're thinking "I want to be part of it too". I get the sentiment but I don't get the logic. I grew up in relatively modest family and we couldn't afford much besides our basic needs, now that I earn three times what I need I still live frugally. I'm focusing on working less and enjoying life rather than earning more money to buy more BS, all it does is create artificial needs that are, by design, _never_ fulfilled
I was reading "A brave new world" again recently and the "conditioning" part of the education made me think of the modern view on the economy, from our earliest age we're bombarded by ads and talks about how we must live for the economy, work for the economy, consume for the economy, production must go up, new products must be created continuously, &c. It's like we built a monster and it took control of us. Don't fool yourself, "you" don't want to consume, we've all been conditioned to think consuming is our main goal.
The trick was really well played, once consuming is your main goal you don't care about much besides a salary allowing you to consume more and keeps the wheel spinning. I think a lot of people will have very hard realisations once they get old enough to start thinking about death and reflecting on the best years of their lives, all this time, energy, money spent on long gone gadgets of instant gratifications which faded away decades ago.
A few quotes from a book written in 67 by Guy Debord, during the infancy of mass marketing and mass consumption, he must have had a good crystal ball back then:
> The proliferation of faddish gadgets reflects the fact that as the mass of commodities becomes increasingly absurd, absurdity itself becomes a commodity.
> Reified people proudly display the proofs of their intimacy with the commodity. Like the old religious fetishism, with its convulsionary raptures and miraculous cures, the fetishism of commodities generates its own moments of fervent arousal. All this is useful for only one purpose: producing habitual submission.
> To this end the reserve army of the unemployed is enlisted into the tertiary or "service" sector, reinforcing the troops responsible for distributing and glorifying the latest commodities at a time when increasingly extensive campaigns are necessary to convince people to buy increas ingly unnecessary commodities.
> The economy's triumph as an independent power at the same time spells its own doom, because the forces it has unleashed have eliminated the economic necessity that was the unchanging basis of earlier societies. Replacing that necessity with a necessity for boundless economic development can only mean replacing the satisfaction of primary human needs (now scarcely met) with an incessant fabrication of pseudo-needs, all of which ultimately come down to the single pseudo-need of maintaining the reign of the autonomous economy.
> the more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle's estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual's gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him. The spectator does not feel at home anywhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.