Everyone screaming for the past century (or longer) about consumerism has been absolutely fucking right.

Americans especially have been poisoned with it, & it is so fucking hard to recover from.

I don't shop to the same degree that a lot of people I know shop (& I couldn't afford it if I wanted to), but I still have collected so much fucking crap along the way, because it was cheap & was "kind of neat" or seemed to represent my identity in some way.