You know, my brain's wheels are turning right now with a thought:
"Is an inflationary money policy the driver behind the desire to endlessly consume?"
Yes.
Our financial system depends on perpetual growth. Since all money is debt-based, we are always creating more of it to service the interest from having borrowed it into existence. If all debts were to be paid off simultaneously, there wouldn't be enough money in the world to actually do it. So we keep creating more. This is monetary inflation, which eventually leads to price inflation
unless you monetize more goods, meaning you make more things available for purchase for the newly created money, thereby balancing out supply & demand and preventing price inflation.
We are being driven towards endless consumption in order to perpetuate the status quo. We are always to be two missed paychecks from destitution so we will latch onto any false form of material happiness marketed towards our fears and frustrations.
Remember this the next time some smug douchebag pulls the "muh EnErGy cOnSumpTIon" card against Bitcoin. Deflationary crypto may yet be the biggest boon for the environment. It turns people from consumers into hodlers.
Disagree, growth is at it's core driven by ever increasing efficiency, lately accelerated by cheap energy.
Consuming is a feature of our brain, not a bug.
The constant search for food and things to make clothes and shelter from is what made us survive and in the end become the most successful animal on the planet, modern day consuming is just a continuation of that behavior, it's hard coded in our brains.
Bitcoin won't stop that behavior, it will just postpone it for a while, and when we do spend the money we will spend so much more of it, IE we will consume much more than before.
For example buying lakes or building small private states in Texas.