Is, I think, nothing more than costuming, props and performance. Think about it like this: we have cultural roles, things we’re supposed to do, jobs, duties, whatever. How you do or don’t do those things equals your performance, how well you execute your part. Consumerism comes from basically just this layer of props and costumes and accessories you can purchase from capitalists, corporations, what-have-you. Consumerism becomes sort of its own thing though, aside from the fruitful performance or execution of your role as a human being within a culture, a society, a community: and you just become obsessed with purchasing better props and costumes as status symbols, so that you can set yourself apart from the crowd (by, paradoxically, copying them). Somehow this is what most people mean when they say “individuality” - they mean the feeling of power that comes from being a consumer and being able to leverage money into choices of what kind of thing to buy based on who you want to fit in with and what idealized media-driven image of perfection you’re trying to artificially set your life according to.

I guess what I’m saying by all this is that “the only thing wrong with consumerism” is when people buy props and costumes and think they can buy talent or popularity by throwing money at something but putting no other effort into it, into self-mastery, into making your life worthwhile instead of just filled with objects you’ve accumulated, but which you don’t really need and which constantly make you feel vaguely uneasy and unsatisfied because you know you don’t really need them and you know they’ll never fill the gap you feel in your life….