> But my main point was, the things I create every day are not essential

A country that only produces essential items (food, shelter) for its population is a very poor country.

Almost by definition, a wealthy country predominantly produces and consumes non-essential goods and services.

It gets really difficult to argue which non-essential goods are worthwhile. Is the art on the wall worth more than the stone lintel? Is it good art? Is it a second hand lintel?

I understand, but from that perspective, pretty much everything in "developed" countries is non-essential, including personal computers (whether desktop, laptop, smartphone, or tablet) and forums like this one to discuss such things. Think of the toxic waste created by all those computers, and the greenhouse gases created by shipping them all over the place! And to what end?

Yeah you're right. I think that's the point the gp comment was making originally. It's not just developed countries either. There are massive industries supporting millions of people that are non-essential. The problem is many of them actually do provide a large increase to quality of life. The improvement granite counters make is questionable, things like computers, phones, vehicles and other large scale damaging things, while not necessarily essential, do bring a dramatic improvement to quality of life and paradoxically enough allow people to make money providing.what is likely another non-essential service or product.

It's always been like this though. In the end, there's no reason for humans to have ever made most of the things we have over the millenia other than because we can and did. Once we had food and shelter and all these things pretty much taken care of, everythong else after was pretty much just for the fuck of it and we've always been at odds with the world and destroyed and altered our environments. The scale has just kept increasing to the point where there are massive global industries devoted to this.

At the same time, humanity still follows our basic survival insticts. We still have that inner subconcious mentality of scarcity when it comes to essentials. So it ends up being treated the same way in our economy as luxury goods and you end up in this situation where people are trading non-essential things for essential things.

If you were supplying things that less affluent people can afford, you might have different but equally strong regrets about the unsustainable ways that business operates. For what it's worth, the full life cycle environmental impact of cheap plastic laminate counters is likely worse than that of polished natural stone.

Yeah probably. I mean pretty much any manufacturing is really at odds with the ecological restoration and ecosystem management degrees I have. I've come to reconcile this dissonance as the non-essential, environment destroying job pays enough money for me to live and have these non-essential things, while trying to help the planet did not. So...there's that. Turns out it's really difficult to live on sparse couple month contracts that are paid with grant money that typically only occur during spring-fall.