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Consumerism

Spending money not equal to happiness

Don't seek external validation for happiness

Sigmund Freud - Psychoanalysis

  • Mass consumer persuasion
  • Product placement in movies
  • Moved humans from needs (things you need) to desire (you want it, doesn't matter if you need it or not)
  • Dress has become an expression
  • Consumptionism
  • Consumerism

How Consumer Propaganda Changed America | Epic Economics - YouTube

Anti-consumerism

Anti-consumerism - Wikipedia

Conspicuous Consumption

The spending of money on and the acquiring of luxury goods and services to publicly display economic power." (related: Veblen goods - "types of luxury goods, such as expensive wines, jewellery, fashion-designer handbags, and luxury cars, which are in demand because of the high prices asked for them.")

A classic example of this would be a luxury watch: A Rolex isn't better at telling the time than a cheap Casio -- but a Rolex signals something about its owner's economic power and thus their social standing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption

Planned Obsolescence

In economics and industrial designplanned obsolescence (also called built-in obsolescence or premature obsolescence) is the concept of policies planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life or a purposely frail design, so that it becomes obsolete after a certain predetermined period of time upon which it decrementally functions or suddenly ceases to function, or might be perceived as unfashionable. Once regarded as a conspiracy theory, the rationale behind this strategy is to generate long-term sales volume by reducing the time between repeat purchases (referred to as "shortening the replacement cycle"). It is the deliberate shortening of the lifespan of a product to force people to purchase functional replacements.

Planned obsolescence - Wikipedia

Batterygate - Wikipedia

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant