(That's a joke, but it also isn't - in a media panopticon society everything is conspicuous, and in an industrial/consumerist society everything is consumption .. that leaves only activities which are productive or collective but done privately. That leaves .. a few of the religions? Someone should break out the Baudrillard at this point, we are not the first to address this question)
Edit: I forgot the major media event of the time, duh; protesting, while very conspicuous, is intrinsically anticonsumerist, and getting injured and teargassed as part of it is sacrificial rather than consumerist.
I would guess anything that doesn't involve exchanging money for an object or experience, in which the quality and/or duration of the object/experience increases with increased cost.
Some ideas off the top of my head:
- Volunteering your time locally in your community (soup kitchen, tutoring underprivileged kids, coaching youth sports, etc.)
- Building interpersonal relationships with new people
- Putting work in to maintain existing interpersonal relationships
- Meditation, mindfulness
- Building a tangible skill that takes intense study/practice over a time scale of multiple years to be considered an expert (craftsmanship, visual arts, martial arts, athletics, etc.)
I believe this widely held view comes from people who have more money than time, so they value time more.
> scientific research is conspicuous consumption (MIT Media Lab?), book authorship is conspicuous consumption, and political candidacy is conspicuous consumption
Is the paper making all these claims? I don't see them.
Then I don't understand who this question is supposed to be directed at:
> Are there any activities left that doesn’t function as a form of conspicuous consumption?
My answer would be that none of the activities you list (with the possible exception of the kind of wannabe entrepreneurship the paper is talking about) are conspicuous consumption. But it seemed like you were directing the question at the authors of the paper, not me.
To the HN community of course.
> My answer would be that none of the activities you list (with the possible exception of the kind of wannabe entrepreneurship the paper is talking about) are conspicuous consumption.
That’s a valid response, although I don’t agree. Note that I’m not regarding these activities to be entirely about conspicuous consumption, just like the paper doesn’t claim all of entrepreneurship is veblenian. Fwiw the paper does cite another work that claims some internships can be viewed as a form of conspicuous consumption.
If your definition of an activity being conspicuous consumption is that somebody, somewhere, can use it for conspicuous consumption, I think you're right that it's going to be hard to find an activity that isn't "conspicuous consumption" by this definition. But I would say that's a problem with your definition.
"Everything you do is either because of X, or you believe it's for some other reason but your subconscious does it because of X anyway."
Perhaps the simple fact is that most people are motivated by the need for social validation, and only a tiny tiny fraction of the population is driven instead by things like intellectual curiosity, desire to help others / solve societal problems, etc. So any class of activity that becomes open to a sufficient number of entrants will eventually turn into a form of conspicuous consumption.
Now scientific research is conspicuous consumption (MIT Media Lab?), book authorship is conspicuous consumption, and political candidacy is conspicuous consumption. Are there any activities left that doesn’t function as a form of conspicuous consumption?