Well we don't need a TV at all. Or a 2,000 square foot house, or an education. We could just subsistence farm or something.

Your life is what you make out of it. I work hard, think consumerism is dumb, and I generally spend my extra income by investing it. But I also enjoy getting some really great coffee (not necessarily from Starbucks) or watching a really fun TV show. Try not to worry too much about what frivolous things people spend money on, or it'll drive you crazy.

>Well we don't need a TV at all. Or a 2,000 square foot house, or an education. We could just subsistence farm or something.

Because it's either BS consumerism or subsistence farming?

Well, what's consumerism to one isn't to another. If you're going to discuss needs and say somebody doesn't "need" something, then frankly there is a lot that we don't "need". To sustain life we could probably all get by as farmers and anything else would just be more than we "need".

What farmers? People used to kill other animals and pick berries, fruits and seeds.

That's pretty tiring. Easier to just throw seeds into the ground and let it grow. You can just pick it much more easily.

It is a simplistic view of it. Hardest part of the farming is not seeding, even not land preparation and maintaining, but making sure that you are the one to pick and keep the harvest.

>Well, what's consumerism to one isn't to another.

The same is true for a number of horrible things too: some people like them and go for them. That doesn't make them less bad.

I'm not in favor of total relativism...

I do not know, but it feels that you equal the consumerism and education. Perhaps this is an misinterpretation?

I doubt if leisure is even possible (at scale) in a free market economy. More than freedom of the market, what works against it is competition. We cant rest our laurels and say heck this is efficient enough. Someone would do it better and there goes my paycheck, to the point that profitability is small enough that it cannot sustain leisure for a significantly large population.

Human desires are unlimited. So this problem isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

That said, I think a lot of overconsumption originates from traumatic childhoods (people trying to fill a hole in their hearts) and the welfare state (people don't know what things truly cost).

>Human desires are unlimited.

Actually they are quite limited on their own. And they're not usually about things either -- aside from food and shelter, people want sex, love, security, etc.

That's why it takes a whole lot of convincing, advertising, conditioning etc. to get people to consume at the level modern societies do (and it took a whole lot of convincing, installment buying, easy credit etc. and nagging to jump start this trend, back in the pre-WWII days).

In order for the economy to work, human desires have to scale to the resources that the individual humans control.

For instance, Elon Musk has developed a desire to colonize Mars. Bill Gates has developed a desire to combat malaria. That is exactly the sort of thing that has to happen in everyone who acquires great wealth. After seeing to the needs of your immediate family, and possibly also your grandchildren, you have an economic duty to spend money, and not just invest it such that it comes right back to you.

Ordinary folks never have quite enough socked away that the economy has to worry about their non-circulating currency. But the rich, as a class, seem to lack the vision to "throw away" their money on grand-scale consumption. The middle classes have picked up some of that slack by buying phones and game consoles and affordable vacation packages, but that has largely served to make the wealthy wealthier, still with no corresponding increase in vision.

So the economy has two options. The rich start actually spending, like Gates and Musk. Or the government breaks the misers' fingers and pries the gold bars out of their grip, to spend on enormously expensive things like wars, welfare, and mega-engineering projects. The latter choice has become somewhat problematic, as the wealthy have discovered and developed ways to recycle the government spending back into their pockets before too much of it is lost to the hoi polloi--largely thanks to the military-industrial complex and corrupted political systems.

So what can a non-wealthy person do to unlock those resources wasting away as the immobile savings of the wealthy, or the tight-looped investments that turn only a few economic gears before returning to the coffers?

Try to get them all addicted to expensive drugs, perhaps? It would be nice if the rich folks of this era actually developed some sense of noblesse oblige, and decided to spend resources on developing the general welfare rather than increasing numbers on balance sheets. Depending on the scale of the wealth, this could be a patronage fund for local artists, or supporting donations to cultural institutions like museums and libraries, or underwriting improvements in the public transit system, or even collecting expensive items like classic cars or celebrity memorabilia.

If your only desire is to be Scrooge McDuck, and swim in your vault full of money, society is far better served by inspiring your heirs to have expensive dreams, and then arranging an unfortunate accident for you. If you don't want that, then spend some of your rassafrassin' money on isht you don't need, whenever you can afford it! If that cash doesn't move, some people out there might not be able to find work.

>That said, I think a lot of overconsumption originates from traumatic childhoods (people trying to fill a hole in their hearts) and the welfare state (people don't know what things truly cost).

What about incessant advertising?

There are people at Starbucks who genuinely enjoy creating those new pumpkin flavored concoctions. It's jobs for which no person enjoys doing that need to be automated, like taping up the same packing box 600 times a day.

I'm sure if you look hard, you can find some people who (would) genuinely enjoy taping up boxes too, generally among people who are mentally challenged. But like the baristas, these jobs will eventually be automated because it'll be cheaper and more efficient to do so than to have humans doing them. If I'm buying crap online from Amazon, I'd rather save money and have my boxes packed by a robot than pay someone to do it, and similarly, if I'm buying a drink, I'd rather save some money and have a robot make it for me, and be much more likely to have a consistent product (human-made coffee/tea drinks are notoriously inconsistent in quality; some baristas suck, and even good baristas make mistakes).

Personally, I think the only real reason to have human workers in our automated future is to have some human contact. So there's no reason to have human baristas: those people stand behind a counter and I may or may not be able to interact with them, depending on how the establishment is laid out. But if I go to a café and sit in a comfy chair and order a drink, I'd rather have a cute college girl bring it to me than a robot.

So basically, until femmebots are invented and perfected, the big value that humans can provide that robots and automation cannot is sex and socialization.

And if they ever invent AI robots that look and act just like people, it's all over for humans because the robots won't have our annoying flaws.

That's fair enough. But a lot of business spends a lot of hours creating a value proposition for it's employees. That turns this idea into a self-fulfilling prophesy sort of work environment.

Just a side note, hedonism is not the same as excess or consumerism: it is the maximization of pleasure over a lifetime. The experiences being sold are not the experiences we enjoy the most.

As a practical matter its like debates between people who know what "begging the question" means vs people who use it incorrectly over and over until the definition changes.

Or like the old definition of "hacker" WRT computers.

The ship has sailed, begging the question now means leading someone to ask a question, hacker means two minutes hate against computer criminals, and hedonism means laughably pitiful time preference problem or what is the opposite of a wise plan for the future.

An excellent point. Thanks for the clarification!

I would argue, however, that hedonism is a human philosophy that leads to pleasure maximization, which means consumerism and excess compliment it.

There are other ways to live your life, that seek to maximize the impact of your effort in other's lives, which do not work was well alongside consumerism.

> Do we really need new original Netflix programming? Do we need whatever crazy-ass pumpkin and coffee flavored beverage a hard working soul at Starbucks or Tim Horton's has cooked up for the fall season?

My wife does...

I'm not that fussed about most of those things but yeah, faster computers and my nice big flat (relatively) cheap TV are nice to have. Do I need them? Nah. Am I willing to work to spend money on them? You bet!

I work a certain amount to earn the basics, and everything after that is for nice things that I want. Is that bad?