The most recommended books on consumerism

The Years is a novel in the form of an autobiography but a novel stripped of the usual cohesion and sense that its protagonist’s life is all moving in a direction that will eventually cohere into some final meaning and that everything in its pages, its various settings, its observations, its smallest details, will all make a single story with its beginning, middle and end.  

But is anyone’s life like that? An epigraph from Ortega Y Gasset gives the clue to how this book unfolds and the atmosphere that moves through it: “All we have is our history, and it does not belong to us.” The narrator, who distances herself from her autobiography by writing about herself in the third person, is born just after World War Two in a provincial town haunted by the war. 

She looks at photographs of herself at various stages of her life, she… show more.

A bracing slap to the face, this book. Or maybe a punch to the gut. The conceit is the series of portraits of hoarders based on the reality show of the same name, and the recipe is to combine their testimonials—“I save old soda cans and turn the tin snips into flowers,” say, or “I want desperately to change”—with lists of objects, described as though in a slow camera pan across a filthy room. But the alchemy is the way Durbin mashes the two together, not quite at random but not correctly either. It’s a harrowing litany of fragments, so specific that the unspoken point is all too clear: what’s broken is much bigger than any of these individual people or things.

In this beautifully written and painfully honest memoir, the author gives up buying anything but consumables for a year. During that year, she realizes the treadmill of consumerism had kept her stuck and unhappy. Working to live, living to work. She dives deep into the cycles of spending, debt, and regret and realizes how often she had turned to spending, food, and booze to avoid feeling her feelings. 

Not only did Cait’s journey remind me so much of my own in my 20’s. Spending money I didn’t have to make myself feel better about things I couldn’t change about myself, all the while ignoring the things I could change, she also reminded me of so many of my clients. Hoping that the stuff they buy will fix their problems.

This journalist, screenwriter, and novelist is well-versed in psychology, mythology, history, and musicology. His essay in this book, Hear That Long Snake Moan, is the single best piece of non-fiction I have ever read, and it inspired me to write my book.

Our disease – the Western divorce of consciousness from flesh – appears as consumerism, environmental degradation, fundamentalism, perpetual war, genocide, and racism. Yet, mysteriously, it may be possible that the terrible uprooting and enslavement of some fifty million black people over three centuries actually initiated a great healing process.

For all its sorrows, the twentieth century saw periods when Dionysian madness seized the Apollonian mind in its flight from the body and brought it back to Earth. African-American music fundamentally altered America and began the slow process of cleaning out the festering wounds underlying puritanism, nationalism, and materialism. We have a long way to go, but Ventura has… show more.

Love People Use Things: Because the Opposite Never Works, by Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus is refreshingly honest account of two men who discover that chasing after the “good life” is a guaranteed soul killer. 

They use good humor, witty insight, and compelling personal examples to challenge the culture of consumerism, and social media envy. 

This book is a valuable guidebook out of overspending, retail therapy, and cluttering your mind and life with things that get in the way of living according to your values and deepest need for healthy relationships.

We are all consumers, much more so since the post-WWII years of prosperity. 

But beyond meeting our family needs and making our lives easier (and certainly more cluttered), mass consumption has taken on deeper political meaning in American culture and society. In many ways, our identities as consumers have replaced our identity as citizens – with increased individualism displacing our commitments to the common good.

This book walks us through the post-war history of consumerism while at the same time places it squarely in the context of cold war politics.

Are we able to use free time, once secured our livelihood, to make life happier?

The Joyless Economy provides a negative answer, as the title already suggests.

The book is premonitory because Scitovsky wrote in the 1970s referring to the United States, while today Americans say they are less happy, despite the economic and technological progress since then..

Scitovsky was still original in explaining this puzzle: the pursuit of happiness in the comfort of material goods and social approval has prevailed over the pleasure of learning, as children do when they play, and then over the pursuit of ambitious life goals.

I loved this book because, although drawing on the psychology and neurosciences of the time, it gives valuable insights for understanding today's world, such as consumerism and the education crisis.

A little confession: fighting awakens a beast inside of me.

Sometimes when I’m in a crowded place, I walk by someone, usually a bigger person, and wonder: “Can I take him down?” Other times, especially in situations of conflict and mostly in the business world, I catch myself looking at my opposition and think “I can totally crush you if I want.” 

I’m not sure Palahniuk has ever traded punches with another human being. But one thing he got right: learning to fight, especially at a place that makes you spar at every session, often creates this maddening sense of power, that can be dangerous, but is a little fun too.

How music became so readily available to Vietnam soldiers is emphasized in Armed with Abundance. Trying to remedy the tenuous morale among GIs, the U.S. military provided them with “creature comforts” in an effort to make war easier, and certainly more palatable. Lair finds that consumption and satiety, more so than privation and sacrifice, defined the experience of most soldiers' Vietnam deployments. She reveals that in 1969 and 1970, for example, soldiers purchased nearly 500,000 radios, 178,000 reel-to-reel tape decks, and 220,000 cassette recorders. Rock and roll was there to stay! 

A friend once asked to whom I’d most want to be apprenticed. I thought about it for a while and answered, “Joan Chittister.” She invariably speaks deeply from a spirituality not limited to her Catholic orthodoxy, but inclusive of many other religious traditions. I never stop learning from her wisdom which often arises from her own experience.

In Chittister’s chapter about endurance, I am reminded of my own struggles as a writer and as a minister and how these struggles have deepened my spiritual understanding. Her words always give me hope and help me to persevere.