Consumerism

Definition

Consumerism is a cultural pattern that orients people’s meaning, contentment, and acceptance primarily around the consumption of goods and services. As cultural beings, much of what humans take for being “natural” is actually cultural in nature. Dietary choices (whether we prefer tea or soda, insects or meat); what we live in (a yurt vs. a multi-thousand-square-foot house); how we dress (fast fashion or durable well-crafted clothing); how we spend our leisure time (gardening or shopping); even which animals we perceive as companions rather than food – all of these are primarily shaped by the cultures we are born and live in. 

In consumer cultures (i.e., those where consumerism is the dominant cultural paradigm), con-sumerism takes a central role in shaping how we live, typically encouraging those activities that increase access to stuff and the immaterial benefits that come with it. Moreover, consumption is typically seen as the primary solution to most problems: if you are overweight, you take medicines or buy expensive diet aids or gym memberships. If you are lonely, you get a pet. If you are bored, you stream entertainment or surf social media. If you want to express love, you buy a gift. If you have so much stuff you cannot fit it in your home, you rent a storage unit to put your extra belong-ings in. In reality, many problems stem directly from overconsumption (e.g., of food, media, or goods), and the best solution is often consuming less, even if in consumer cultures that can be over-looked or even seen as culturally taboo. This reality applies to environmental problems as much as to individual and social ones. For example, the most effective solution to reduce fossil fuels is not to replace them with renewables but to reduce overall consumption levels (see Sufficiency, Energy Overshoot). 

History

Some argue that consumerism started in the 1950s, as the United States scrambled to keep production going after the end of World War II, cultivating a “Consumer Republic” to replace the wartime economy (Cohen, 2003). Economist Victor Lebow, writing in 1955, even suggested that “our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption”. 

However, the development of consumerism was a longer, more organic process. It evolved over several hundred years, in ways subtle and overt. For example, an 18th-century British pot-tery manufacturer, Josiah Wedgwood, had salespeople go door-to-door drumming up excitement for new pottery designs, creating demand for newer lines of products, even from customers who already had perfectly good, but now seemingly outdated, pottery sets (Stearns, 2001). Global trade and colonial expansion also played a role, opening up new markets, and creating demand for new products, from exotic new fruits and vegetables to porcelain, sugar, and tobacco. The development of the corporation also created structures to enable more business risk, as well as debt structures that drove growth and cultivation of demand. 

Marketing, in simple forms like store displays and newspaper ads, informed potential customers about new products, and over time evolved to encourage and drive consumption, particularly as mass-media technologies and sophisticated psychologically manipulative advertising developed. The global growth curve for consumerism has certainly been exponential, with the last 75 years accelerating in the overall reach of this pattern. For example, one measure of consumerism – global advertising expenditures – grew from $79 billion in 1950 to $1.63 trillion in 2023 (2023 dollars). 

Human nature also played a part in cementing the consumerism paradigm. As social animals, we compare ourselves to others in our social group. As global interconnection grew (telegraph, radio, cinema, TV, internet), this led to comparing ourselves to the very richest around the world and finding our own consumption patterns inadequate. Even “keeping up with the Joneses” (i.e., coveting new things your neighbors bought and striving to buy these yourself) more locally can lead people to upgrade cars, homes, clothing, and televisions, in a perpetual hamster wheel of consumption (see Conspicuous/Positional Consumption). 

This is further exacerbated by the hedonic treadmill, in which humans habituate to the new (good or bad) and thus require new experiences to get another thrill, which is most readily visible in the consumer practice of travel, exploring new restaurants, and regularly upgrading their vehicles. The Diderot Effect, named after the French philosopher who got a new dressing gown that made the rest of his home look shabby, can aggravate this further as people keep consuming more to replace old items, to align with the aesthetic of their newer ones. This has all been intensified further by the cultivation of obsolescence – both physical (where products are intentionally designed to break) and psychological, where products no longer feel satisfying (often driven by marketing for newer versions) – thus driving individuals to replace these goods (see Product Returns and Right of Withdrawal). 

Along with ill-health, social inequality, and environmental devastation, consumerism can lock people into this system via indebtedness (see Sustainable Finance, Money). The average per capita credit card debt in the United States in 2023 was $6,501, adding up to $1.12 trillion in total. Adding in mortgages and other debts, the average American household carried $104,215 of debt in 2023. Individual, business, and government debt further lock societies into consumer cultural pat-terns, requiring individuals to work more, businesses to sell more, and governments to encourage growth to pay back their debts. 

Different Perspectives

Recognizing that consumerism is embedded in and comes out of culture makes it clearer that to address the phenomenon, we have to shift the dominant cultural paradigm. All cultures are shaped by (and shape) key societal institutions, including business, education, media, government, traditions, and social movements (Assadourian, 2010) (see Political Economy of Consumerism, The Role of Business, Education for Sustainable Consumption, Values and Consumption, Social Norms). Many of these institutions perpetuate consumerism – such as schools that provide curricula sponsored by junk food companies or media that market to children, socializing the next generation of consumers. However, they can also be harnessed to cultivate an alternative (e.g., a sustainability paradigm). 

There have been many attempts to make sustainability feel as natural as consumerism in classrooms, through policy, by greening religious traditions (see Spiritual Consumption), with ecocentric film and media, and through movements like Slow Food (see Community Supported Agriculture, Food Miles). But these all add up to a drop in the bucket compared to global advertising and the broader marketing and lobbying efforts of companies and interests promoting facets of consumerism (as well as the sheer momentum of several centuries of consumerism). 

Applications

At this point, we are immersed in a world where consumerism is natural, and where in the ten most spoken languages in the world, consumer is synonymous with person (Assadourian, 2010). Breaking out of this pattern willingly (as opposed to waiting until ecological breakdown makes consumerism impossible for the majority of people) will require bold – and potentially unpopular – interventions (see Box 1.1). 

Of course, there are hundreds of other potential intervention points as well: developing eco-centric schools and curricula; denormalizing regular meat consumption, and shifting instead to “celebratory” meat consumption (on festive days only, as was the way in many cultures historically) (see Protein Shift, Social Tipping Points); even shifting the culture of travel so that flying becomes normal as a “once-in-a-life-phase” experience, rather than a routine luxury. 

The key to this, however, is to see consumerism through a cultural lens and recognize that changing consumption patterns requires a transformation in cultures, which in turn requires strategically utilizing societal institutions as levers of cultural change. 

Further Reading

Assadourian, Erik. (2010). The rise and fall of consumer cultures. In Worldwatch Institute (Ed.), State of the world 2010: Transforming cultures: From consumerism to sustainability, pp. 3–20. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 

Cohen, Lizabeth. (2003). A consumer’s republic: The politics of mass consumption in postwar America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 

Lebow, Victor. (1955). Price competition in 1955. Journal of Retailing (Spring), 7. Available at: https://mron-line.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Lebow.pdf (accessed: 13 January 2025). 

Stearns, Peter N. (2001). Consumerism in world history: The global transformation of desire. New York: Routledge. 

Vale, Robert, & Vale, B. (2009). Time to eat the dog? The real guide to sustainable living. London: Thames & Hudson.