Examples Of Consumerism In Fight Club

Superior Essays
Brandon Colon

America, the land built on capitalism and a land driven by consumerism: a belief that it is good for people to spend a lot of money on goods and services. This is a belief the American people have fully bought into, an idea that having more stuff will make you happier. This belief has been bought into now, more than its ever been, we today as Americans consume more than any generation of Americans before us. In fact this idea of mass consumption is exactly what our whole economy is based of off. In fact when we had our stimulus programs a couple years ago, the government handed away millions in hopes that people would turn around and spend those same millions to boost our economy. The government sent us one message and one message
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A film that uses very Nietzscheian ideologies such as the death of God, trying to find meaning in life and of course the concept of the Ubermensch. For the purposes of this piece, the only concepts of the film that relate to consumerism, is the concept of the Ubermench and letting go of old values and creating new ones in order to find meaning (existence precedes essence). Like the film expresses, I think that many of us think that having stuff, makes us who we are . “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, and working jobs we hate so we can buy stuff we don’t need. You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet.” However these ideas of “money and material is everything” is not our fault, instead its the fault of our society and the country we live in. We emphasize and glorify the fact that we have the worlds largest GDP, and granted, it is something to be proud of, but this also means we must program our people to be buyers. Thats the way it works, the more people buy, the bigger and better our economy will be. This is where people in favor of consumerism come in to play. They realize that buying a lot helps the country as a whole. They don't understand or refuse to see that although it helps the U.S.A as a whole, it doesn't help us as individuals. However they continue to see consumerism as not being a problem . They say that we have not changed into “self-obsessed, all-consuming machines aimlessly wandering through a meaningless artificial existence” like Fight Club would suggest we have. In fact, people who are pro consumerism are saying quite the opposite. They say that Americans don't have a problem of over consumption and

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