From: http://www.raptitude.com/2011/01/how-to-make-trillions-of-dollars/
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After the second world war, a few privileged Americans developed a brilliant formula for building an unimaginably huge economy:
[Our 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. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns [...] We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing pace. We need to have people eat, drink, dress, ride, live, with ever more complicated and, therefore, constantly more expensive consumption.
~American retail analyst
This is very-high-level marketing, and it has formed most of the developed world around you.
Using the television as their primary tool, very-high-level marketers have managed to create a nation of people who typically:
- work almost all the time
- absorb several hours of advertising every night, in their own homes
- are tired and unhealthy and vaguely dissatisfied with their lives
- respond to boredom, dissatisfaction, or anxiety only by buying and consuming things
- have disposable income but can’t find a more fulfilling line of work without losing their health insurance
- create health problems for themselves, which can be treated with drugs they can “ask their doctor about”
- own far more items than they use, and believe they don’t have enough
- are easily distracted from the unhealthy state of their lives and their culture by breaking news and celebrity gossip
- perpetually convince themselves it is not the right time to make major lifestyle changes
- happily buy stuff that breaks within a year, and which nobody knows how to fix
- have learned, through the media’s culture of blame-mongering, that the key to solving public and private issues is to find the right people to hate
