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Consumerism Quotes

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Consumerism Quotes

“Getting through life without a lot of money, possessions, and/or friends is admirable, especially if it is by choice.”

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Author:Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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“In the depths of our winters, we are all wolfish. We want in the archaic sense of the word, as if we are lacking something and need to absorb it in order to be whole again. These wants are often astonishingly inaccurate: drugs and alcohol, which poison instead of reintegrate; relationships with people who do not make us feel safe or loved; objects that we do not need, cannot afford, which hang around our necks like albatrosses of debt long after the yearning for them has passed. Underneath this chaos and clutter lies a longing for more elemental things--love, beauty, comfort, a short spell of oblivion once in a while.”

LoveComfortLongingWinterDebtNeedConsumerismOblivionClutter
Book:Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
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“When deeply religious subjects view sacred iconography or reflect on their notion of God, brain scans reveal hyperactivity in the caudate nucleus, a part of the pleasure system that correlates with feelings of joy, love, and serenity. But Lindstrom and Calvert found that this same brain region lights up when subjects view images associated with strong brands like Ferrari or Apple.”

GodPleasureMarketingSerenityBrandingConsumerismNeurobiologyBranding Marketing
Book:Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work
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“In 1989, I asked the GDR ambassador in Washington, D.C. why his country made such junky two-cylinder cars. He said the goal was to develop good public transportation and discourage the use of costly private vehicles. But when asked to choose between a rational, efficient, economically sound and ecologically sane mass transportation system or an automobile with its instant mobility, special status, privacy, and personal empowerment, the East Germans went for the latter, as do most people in the world. The ambassador added ruefully: "We thought building a good society would make good people. That's not always true." Whether or not it was a good society, at least he was belatedly recognizing the discrepancy between public ideology and private desire.”

DesireFreedomConsumerismProduction
Book:Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
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“Living as a slave to unchecked personal desire and subjugated to external circumstances is wearisome. It is a common error to devote a person’s life to earning money. While money relives us from the stress of suffering from deprivation, moneymaking will not make us happy. A person must have passion in life in order to achieve any degree of personal bliss.”

DesireCapitalismCapitalistConsumptionConsumerismConsumer CultureMoneymakingConsumerist
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Suppose you woke up one morning to discover that you were the last person on earth. [...] In the situation described, you could satisfy many material desires that you can't satisfy in our actual world. You could have the car of your dreams. You could even have a showroom full of expensive cars. You could have the house of your dreams - or live in a palace. You could wear very expensive clothes. You could acquire not just a big diamond ring but the Hope Diamond itself. The interesting question is this: without people around, would you still want these things?”

DesireMaterialismConsumerismMaterial ThingsMaterial WorldMaterial PossessionsMaterialistic SocietyWhat We WantWhat Do I WantWhy We Want
Book:On Desire: Why We Want what We Want
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“You swallow hard when you discover that the old coffee shop is now a chain pharmacy, that the place where you first kissed so-and-so is now a discount electronics retailer, that where you bought this very jacket is now rubble behind a blue plywood fence and a future office building. Damage has been done to your city. You say, ''It happened overnight.'' But of course it didn't. Your pizza parlor, his shoeshine stand, her hat store: when they were here, we neglected them. For all you know, the place closed down moments after the last time you walked out the door. (Ten months ago? Six years? Fifteen? You can't remember, can you?) And there have been five stores in that spot before the travel agency. Five different neighborhoods coming and going between then and now, other people's other cities. Or 15, 25, 100 neighborhoods. Thousands of people pass that storefront every day, each one haunting the streets of his or her own New York, not one of them seeing the same thing.”

ChangeMemoriesLossIndividualityNew York CityConsumerismModern SocietyRetailTransienceNeighborhoodsChain StoresMom And Pop Stores
Book:The Colossus of New York
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“Standing alone today demands even more courage and strength than it did in former cultures. From infancy, children have been programmed to perform. Rather than living from their own needs and feelings, they learn to assess situations in order to please others. Without an inner core of certainty grounded in their own musculature, they lack the inner resources to stand alone. Pummelled by mass media and peer group pressures, their identity may be utterly absorbed by collective stereotypes. In the absence of adequate rites of passage, ad-men become the high priests of an initiation into the addictions of consumerism.”

MediaIndividualityConformityConsumerismIndependent ThinkingModern CultureConformism
Book:The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation
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“...those thoroughly incorporated within the inexorable logic of the market and its demands find that there is little time and space in which to explore emancipatory potentialities outside what is marketed as 'creative' adventure, leisure, and spectacle. Obliged to live as appendages of the market and of capital accumulation rather than as expressive beings, the realm of freedom shrinks before the awful logic and the hollow intensity of market involvements”

WealthFreedomCapitalismIndividualityConsumerismNeoliberalismMarket
Author:David Harvey
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“The spectacle is a permanent opium war designed to force people to equate goods with commodities and to equate satisfaction with a survival that expands according to its own laws. Consumable survival must constantly expand because it never ceases to include privation. If augmented survival never comes to a resolution, if there is no point where it might stop expanding this is because it is itself stuck in the realm of privation. It may gild poverty, but it cannot transcend it.”

PovertyCapitalismConsumerism
Book:The Society of the Spectacle
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“When selecting a one-night stand, a heterosexual woman who is materialistic is a trillion times more likely to choose a sexually unattractive poor man who seems rich over a sexually attractive rich man who seems poor.”

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Book:The Use and Misuse of Children
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“The second most dangerous thing about money is that it leaves most of the people who have a lot of it with the unshakable belief that they are intelligent and well informed. The most dangerous thing about it is that it leaves most of the people who do not have a lot of money with the very same belief.”

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Author:Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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“In our race to show off our wealth, we are more like a rat on a wheel consuming material goods while trying to keep up with the Jones family.”

WealthBalanceFinanceConsumerismRat RaceShow Off
Book:Outsmart the Money Magicians: Maximize Your Net Worth by Seeing Through the Most Powerful Illusions Performed by Wall Street and the IRS
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“Homes, and other purchases like it, supposedly prove to our community that we have money, but many times these purchases are just signaling to others that we used to have money.”

WealthMoneyPerceptionFinanceConsumerismVirtue Signaling
Book:Outsmart the Money Magicians: Maximize Your Net Worth by Seeing Through the Most Powerful Illusions Performed by Wall Street and the IRS
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“Money made by our own effort is limited by how much time, energy, and attention we can give to a task along with what other people will pay for us to do that task. Making money in this firsthand fashion is hard on us because we run our own personal rat race.”

WealthMoneyBalanceRetirementConsumerismPrincipleRat Race
Book:Outsmart the Money Magicians: Maximize Your Net Worth by Seeing Through the Most Powerful Illusions Performed by Wall Street and the IRS
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“Don’t increase your lifestyle until your passive income surpasses your active income. You’ll know you can and should buy that luxury item when the cost of keeping it is totally covered by your passive income. The things you own (such as dividend-paying stocks, oil partnerships, and real estate investment trusts) should pay for the things you enjoy and consume.”

WealthLifestyleConsumerismFinancial FreedomRat RaceFinancial IndependenceBudgetingPassive Income
Book:Outsmart the Money Magicians: Maximize Your Net Worth by Seeing Through the Most Powerful Illusions Performed by Wall Street and the IRS
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“Joanna Macy writes that until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it—grieving is a sign of spiritual health. But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair.”

NatureGriefHealingDespairCapitalismConsumerismTheftRestorationWound
Book:Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
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“Board members, officers, executives, directors, managers, client service experts and geniuses: We, the consumers, want you to succeed. We dearly want to believe you know what you’re doing — and that you care about our respect and appreciation. It doesn’t take much to make us feel both looked after and loyal. But it doesn’t take much to make us feel like fools, either, and we’re less afraid to talk about it.”

HumorTruthEgoRespectConsumerismCostumer Loyalty
Author:Regina Barreca
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“Those in power love it when we hold on to our fake optimism year after year, instead of revolting against these worn out celebrations. They love it when they see millions of mindless consumers storming stores to buy and consume more shiny and glittering gifts, as if they are genuine signs of loving and caring for each other. They love it when we keep quiet and do business as usual while ‘hoping for a better new year.’ So, let’s declare it loud and clear: We are not happy! Also, there is nothing new with these traditional celebrations hijacked by businessmen who have reduced them into nothing more than an excuse for consuming goods.”

InspirationalWisdomHappinessPowerOptimismDeceptionConsumerismNew Year S ResolutionsConsumer Culture
Author:Louis Yako
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“Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried. Those who work shit jobs tend to be the object of indignities; they not only work hard but also are held in low esteem for that very reason. But at least they know they're doing something useful. Those who work bullshit jobs are often surrounded by honor and prestige; they are respected as professionals, well paid, and treated as high achievers - as the sort of people who can be justly proud of what they do. Yet secretly they are aware that they have achieved nothing; they feel they have done nothing to earn the consumer toys with which they fill their lives; they feel it's all based on a lie - as, indeed, it is.”

InspirationalWorkBullshitConsumerism
Book:Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
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“Instead, it is because we have invented a bizarre sadomasochistic dialectic whereby we feel that pain in the workplace is the only possible justification for our furtive consumer pleasures, and, at the same time, the fact that our jobs thus come to eat up more and more of our waking existence means that we do not have the luxury of - as Kathi Weeks has so concisely put it - "a life," and that, in turn, means that furtive consumer pleasures are the only ones we have time to afford.”

LifeWorkCapitalismConsumerism
Book:Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
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“The development of productive technologies offered western society a choice: to have more leisure time, or to increase the production and consumption of consumer goods. Capitalism took us down the latter path, and the Utopian dream of ease and leisure for all was buried under a mountain of commodities. [ch.three]”

WorkCapitalismConsumerismAlienation
Book:The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work
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“(Guaranteeing Tomorrow) I watch in sorrow most people occupied with collecting more money getting more promotions building bigger houses purchasing more real estate and other possessions new cars more products to consume… I see people obsessed with owning anything and everything they could lay their hands on to guarantee tomorrow to ensure luxurious lives… Yet few realize that tomorrow may never come, and if it does come, it shall be sad, scary, and desolate… Few realize that it may not rain tomorrow that the land may completely dry up that everyone’s preoccupation with possessing more, is the very thing that shall cause humanity’s demise, after draining all possible forms of life… Few are aware that the panic, the fear, and the obsession with guaranteeing tomorrow, are exactly what have made tomorrow impossible to guarantee… What a painful paradox… [Original poem published in Arabic on February 7, 2024 at ahewar.org]”

HumanityFearEnvironmentTomorrowFutureCapitalismConsumerismPlanetArabic PoetryThe Future Of Us
Author:Louis Yako
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“Professions of psychiatry, therapy and mindfulness are bound to boom in parallel with unmoderated consumerism, for unmoderated consumerism facilitates self-absorption which in turn breeds anxiety, and the more anxious you are, the more you need expert help to deal with that anxiety.”

PsychologyHuman NatureAnxietySelfishnessTherapyConsumerismPsychiatrySelf AbsorbedSelf ObsessionShopaholic
Book:Hometown Human: To Live for Soil and Society
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“Most people do not mind having a house that is smaller and/or a car that is cheaper than their neighbours’, as long as they each earn and have more money than their neighbours, and, equally important, their neighbours know that.”

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Author:Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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“Life and Abundance (The Sonnet) A person to take refuge in, a purpose to be driven by, that's all you need to lead a good life. A roof to take shelter under, couple meals to feed our hunger, that's all you need to lead a good life. Brain at the base of the mind, Heart at the base of existence, Character at the base of the shoulder, that's all you need to lead a good life. Materialism normalized as abundance chains freedom, and renders life a cripple. True abundance instills content not clutter, Actual needs of life are rather little.”

PurposeRelationshipAbundanceMaterialismGood LifeConsumerismSimple LifeMaterialisticBasic NeedsSustainable Living
Book:World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets
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“An ever growing part of our major institutions’ functions is the cultivation and maintenance of three sets of illusions which turn the citizen into a client to be saved by experts...The first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are born to be consumers and that they can attain any of their goals by purchasing goods and services. This illusion is due to an educated blindness to the worth of use-values in the total economy. In none of the economic models serving as national guidelines is there a variable to account for non-marketable use-values any more than there is a variable for nature's perennial contribution.”

EducationEconomicsInstitutionsValueConsumerismAutonomyUsefulnessIllusions
Book:The Right to Useful Unemployment: And Its Professional Enemies
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“The first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are born to be consumers and that they can attain any of their goals by purchasing goods and services....What people do or make but will not or cannot put up for sale is as immeasurable and as invaluable for the economy as the oxygen they breathe.”

EconomicsValueConsumerism
Book:The Right to Useful Unemployment: And Its Professional Enemies
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