Capitalism, Consumerism, and Knowing When Enough Is Enough
Reading time: 15 min
This has been a tricky article to write. It has received many rewrites and additions, partly because it comes from a place of privilege, but also because I cannot seem to stop adding thoughts. And maybe that is part of the point, and part of the problem.
This is not aimed at those who have too little. It is aimed more at those of us lucky enough to live in the developed world, with enough comfort and security to pause and ask: what are we actually doing?
If you step back and think about it, once your basic needs are met, the endless pursuit of more starts to look increasingly strange.
More money. More work. More stuff. More status. More upgrades. More convenience. More choices. More pressure.
And yet, while the end goal of all this is normally more happiness, it rarely works out that way past a certain point.
When Do We Have Enough?
A recent study showed happiness vs wealth as a bell curve. Once your basic needs, plus a bit more for comfort and enjoyment, are met, more money does not necessarily equal more happiness.
Unfortunately, in Australia and around the world, the cost of living seems to be undergoing a steep increase. This will differ greatly depending on where you live, even within Australia.
Someone living in inner-city Sydney will need a much higher income than someone living elsewhere simply to cover the essentials.
Having “enough” to comfortably cover needs and reduce money worries is crucial. In Australia, that is often quoted as somewhere around A$75,000 a year per person on average.
Between A$75,000 and approximately A$200,000 on average is where happiness seems to peak. That is a large gap, I know, but this is an average.
Where I live, in a more rural area, I would argue peak happiness could be achieved much closer to A$75,000 per person. But this seems to be increasing and will depend greatly on your perspective.
Beyond that peak, you tend to find diminishing returns, and the increase in happiness becomes less pronounced. For instance, the difference in happiness between earning A$150,000 and A$250,000 is minimal compared to the jump from A$40,000 to A$75,000.
Beyond the essentials, however much that is to you, happiness depends less on how much you earn and more on how you spend your money, how much time you have, the strength of your relationships, and what you value.
The Rat Race We Mistake for Life
Modern capitalism is very good at convincing us that life is a ladder. You start at the bottom, work hard, earn more, buy better things, move up, and eventually arrive somewhere.
But where?
A bigger house filled with things we barely use? A newer car that sits in traffic beside all the other newer cars? A better job that pays more but quietly consumes more of our time, attention, and energy?
The promise is always that peace and happiness will come later.
Once the mortgage is smaller. Once the business grows. Once the promotion comes. Once the kids are older. Once retirement arrives. Once we finally have “enough”.
But capitalism has an annoying habit of constantly moving the finish line.
The hedonic treadmill: what was once a luxury becomes normal. What was once enough becomes inadequate. What was once a treat becomes a subscription. And do not get me started on the modern forced subscription model.
Consumerism thrives by making contentment feel like failure.
Fight Club is one of my favourite books and film adaptations. Having read and watched both many times, it is something I seem to come back to every year or two. It is an excellent wake-up call for those who have sunk back into the rat race.
While Fight Club takes things to the extreme for entertainment purposes, the underlying message about wasting your life competing in, or participating in, the rat race is something more people need to be reminded of and consider deeply.
Some of my favorite Fight Club quotes that seem to consistently ring true as I progress further through life:
“We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like.”
“The things you own end up owning you.”
“This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.”
The Fisherman and the Businessman
One of my favourite stories on the subject, is the story of the fisherman and the businessman:
A businessman was at the pier of a small coastal village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several freshly caught fish. The businessman asked the fisherman how long it took to catch them as he admired the fish. The fisherman replied, “Only a few hours each day.” The businessman then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish. The fisherman said he had enough to take care of his family. The businessman then asked, “But what do you do with the rest of your time?” The fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and happy life.” The businessman scoffed. “I have a business degree and could help you. You should work harder, catch more fish, make more money, and then buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats; eventually, you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this little village and move to the city, where you will run your growing business.” The fisherman asked, “But how long will all this take?” To which the businessman replied, “Fifteen to twenty years.” “But what then?” asked the fisherman. The businessman laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!” “Millions you say… then what?” The businessman thought for a long moment and eventually said: “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos."
Work Enough, Not Endlessly
I recently read Mark Boyle’s The Moneyless Man, and while I found it fascinating, it also felt extreme. Living without money may free you from one system, but it can also create a different kind of burden, where much of your time is spent working very hard simply to get by.
In my opinion, there is a middle ground: enoughism.
Work a little. Ideally, work at something useful, meaningful, or at least tolerable. Earn enough to live well, but be careful not to confuse living well with endlessly increasing your standard of consumption.
The goal should not be to escape all responsibility. The goal should be to build a life where work supports living, rather than slowly replacing it.
That might mean working part time. It might mean choosing a smaller house, keeping an older car, buying fewer things, cooking more, repairing more, or simply refusing to chase every upgrade placed in front of us.
It might mean accepting less money in exchange for more time.
And as we know, time, unlike money, cannot be earned back later.
The Problem With “More”, and a Sock Rant
The trouble with consumerism is not just that it wastes money. It wastes your time and attention.
Take something as ordinary as socks. You buy cheap socks, they wear out very quickly, so you buy better socks. Then you research durable socks. Then ethical socks. Then merino socks. Then lifetime-guarantee socks. Then you wonder whether the expensive durable socks are better for the environment, or whether the company is just better at marketing.
Even the “buy less, buy better” movement is at risk of becoming yet another form of greenwashed consumerism.
Brands like Patagonia are interesting in this space. On one hand, durable, repairable, better-made products are clearly preferable to disposable rubbish. On the other hand, even ethical consumption can still become over consumption. Buying an expensive jacket you do not need is still buying something you do not need.
The better question is not always “which product should I buy?”, but “do I need to buy anything at all?”
Personally, I have wasted far too many hours, more than zero, of my life researching which socks to buy, and this is beyond frustrating for many reasons.
This applies to almost everything, not just socks.
I am sick of crappy products and services.
I am sick of wasting my life trying to find even semi-decent products and services. This should not be so difficult.
I am sick of false advertising and vested interests pushing crappy products and services for top dollar.
I am sick of big businesses throwing money in every direction to saturate the market with their crappy product or service to make maximum profit.
I am sick of enshittification.
I am sick of shills pushing these crappy products simply so they can make a buck.
I am sick of big businesses paying bot farms to positively review their crappy products and services, further confusing matters.
I am sick of buying crappy products under the impression they are better than they are, even after plenty of research.
I am sick of big business doing everything it takes to maximise profits at the cost of absolutely everything and everyone else.
I am sick of the people who work for these businesses helping this goal become reality.
I am sick of governments supporting big business in its efforts to maximise profits at the cost of everything and everyone else.
I am sick of a large segment of Western society swallowing the capitalism pill and focusing on making as much money as possible at the cost of everything and everyone else.
End sub-rant.
Wealth, Fairness, and the Myth of Deserving Everything
I find the idea of capped wealth interesting, and as I get older it appeals to me more and more.
There is something deeply broken about a world where a tiny percentage of people can hold unimaginable wealth while others struggle for basic necessities. At some point, wealth stops being about comfort, freedom, or reward, and becomes about power: inflicting your version of what the world should be on others while still accumulating as much wealth as possible. See current-day Donald Trump, tech bros such as Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, etc., and closer to home, Gina Rinehart, Clive Palmer, and others.
The vast majority of these individuals, and the companies they represent, make up the modern-day plutocracy, using their wealth to influence power and governance at the expense of broader societal interests.
No individual needs billions of dollars. Whether an individual even needs millions is questionable.
That level of wealth does not represent someone working thousands of times harder than everyone else. It represents a system that allows wealth to accumulate upwards, often through ownership, leverage, inheritance, political influence, and the labour of others.
In my personal experience, those paid the big bucks are also supposed to make the big decisions, with equally big repercussions if those decisions are wrong. However, this reality rarely seems to ring true.
Countries like Denmark and Sweden are often used as examples of places with higher taxes, stronger public services, smaller wealth gaps, and high levels of reported happiness. They are not perfect, of course, but they do suggest that a society can be organised around something other than maximum individual accumulation.
In those cultures, at least from the outside, there seems to be less worship of extreme wealth. A garbage collector and a CEO may still have different incomes, but the social distance between them appears far smaller than in countries like Australia or the United States, where inequality seems to keep stretching.
The most frustrating part is that meaningful reform is unlikely while the vast majority of the people in charge not only benefit from the system, but try to tweak it in their favour even further while framing it as beneficial to the public at large. Politicians are often wealthy themselves, closely connected to wealthy interests, or dependent on systems that reward protecting the status quo.
On paper, the concept of capitalism seems like it should work well as a self-correcting system. However, once again, concept and reality do not seem to land remotely near each other.
How many times do taxpayer dollars have to subsidise or bail out large private companies that file for bankruptcy while continuing to pay the CEOs who bankrupted them large sums of money? Under capitalism, those businesses should have simply failed and better companies should have taken their place.
Monopolies are pretty much the end goal of the capitalist system. But surprising no one, monopolies have a huge downside. Once a company reaches a certain size, it can simply buy out its competitors and enshittify them, or shut them down entirely. This squashes advancement and competition, meaning monopolies can sit on their laurels and still make maximum profits rather than chasing innovation and advancement.
This is supposed to be reined in by governments, but rarely is.
A major defence of capitalism is that as the rich get richer, the money flows down and raises everyone’s standard of living. However, it is becoming more and more obvious that this rarely comes to pass in the real world. The rich get richer by exploiting those, and the resources, beneath them, while doing the absolute bare minimum to keep everyone from rioting. Yes, living standards may rise for some, but it is often at a glacial pace and at the expense of the planet and others.
The reality is that the living standards of very few rise, while for the majority, it seems to get no better or worse.
Those who crave power should not be allowed to obtain it. A fairer society would require people with power to give some of it up.
History suggests they rarely do that willingly.
It would almost seem that those with the least desire for power and governance are likely to be the best at the job.
COVID and the Brief Return of Perspective
One positive outcome from the recent COVID epidemic was that it gave people a brief opportunity to lift their heads above water.
Before COVID, many people appeared to accept a heavily work-focused life as normal. Long commutes, long hours, constant availability, and the vague promise that it would all be worth it eventually.
Then suddenly, for many workers, that rhythm was interrupted.
People spent more time at home. They saw their families more. They cooked lunch in their own kitchens. They walked around their neighbourhoods. They realised how much of their lives were being wasted in and around work.
Not everyone had this experience, of course. Many essential workers had an even harder time. But for a large number of office workers, COVID revealed something important: the old way was not inevitable.
Working from home became normal. Part-time work became more prevalent. Flexible hours became more possible. People began to question whether being physically present in an office five days a week was really necessary, or whether it simply suited managers and landlords.
And now, predictably, many businesses are trying to claw that back.
The language is usually about culture, productivity, collaboration, or team building. Sometimes that may be genuine. But more often than not, it seems to mean: we had control of your life before, both inside and outside of work, and we would like it back.
Always Connected, Never Finished
Anecdotally, people often say that work-life balance immediately after the eight-hour-day and five-day-work-week movements was much better than it is today, or at least pre-COVID.
That may sound strange, because many modern jobs are physically easier than they once were. But the difference is that work used to stop.
The factory closed. The office shut. The shop lights went off. You went home.
Now, for many people, work follows them everywhere. Email, phones, messaging apps, shared calendars, notifications, and the quiet expectation that a good employee is always somewhat available.
Even when we are not working, we are often work-adjacent.
Checking. Thinking. Preparing. Worrying.
For many, there is no clean end to the day. No proper switch-off. No clear line between paid time and personal life.
That is not progress.
That is work leaking into the parts of your life it should never occupy, with businesses slowly eroding your most precious resource, time, back in their favour for free.
Work to Live
France is often used as an example of a healthier relationship with work. Not perfect, but different. There appears to be a stronger cultural understanding that work is only one part of life, and not necessarily the most interesting part.
I witnessed this personally years ago when travelling through Europe. Workers seemed to have long lunches, going out with friends or heading back home for a proper meal rather than eating alone at their desk.
When they are at work, it is simply a job, not their life. When they stop work for lunch or at the end of the day, they are done.
You hear a lot of travellers say many French workers are rude, or at least nonchalant. We certainly experienced this in our travels. However, in hindsight, I now believe this also stems from the fact that the French have a better work-life balance. They are more interested in living life than working, and this often comes through in their attitudes while at work.
Ask some people what they do, and they will tell you their job title.
Ask others, and they will tell you about food, family, travel, music, sport, politics, books, gardens, or where they grew up.
That difference matters.
When work becomes your identity, consumerism often follows. We work more, earn more, spend more, and then need to keep working more to support the life we built around working more.
The alternative is not laziness.
It is deliberate living.
It is asking what kind of life we actually want, and then being brave enough not to chase someone else’s version of success.
Enough
At its core, this is about knowing when enough is enough.
Enough money to be happy.
Enough money to be safe.
Enough work to be useful.
Enough comfort to be grateful.
Enough stuff to meet our needs.
Enough ambition to better ourselves, but not so much that it consumes us.
There is nothing wrong with wanting a good life. There is nothing wrong with earning money, owning nice things, or enjoying comfort. The problem begins when we stop choosing those things consciously and start following the script automatically.
The script says more is always better.
But more often also means more debt, more stress, more maintenance, more comparison, more clutter, more obligation, and less time doing what you really want.
A simpler life is not a poorer life.
Often it is the opposite, for all the right reasons.
Richer in happiness, time, attention, health, relationships, usefulness, rest, and freedom.
The fisherman did not need millions to retire into a good life.
He knew he was already living one.