The consumerist cycle is indeed a vicious trap in some ways when we place it in the context of self-actualisation. I’d like to add that another component or alternative to Terror thinking is our scarcity thinking. We still all live like we need to hoard nuts like Scrat from Ice Age.

A reasonable solution is the Sublime from Schopenhauer, or an alternative enlightened moment in once life were one does indeed she ourselves part of a Cosmic whole. Or otherwise said from that movie “What we do in life, echoes in eternity.”