I never looked at it that way: consumerism is the love of buying things, materialism is the love of the things themselves.
The spiral of possession as self-expression.
It’s indeed crazy that trying to live waste-free is considered more extreme than spending the night queuing in the cold for a new phone.
It's not your imagination, products you buy are worse now. Fashion falls apart. Gadgets become unusable, etc. Mainly due to accelerating market changes rather than a deliberate reduction in material quality alone.
Fast-forward a handful of decades, and now several generations of people are conditioned to buy the new thing and to keep replacing it. Companies, in turn, amp up production accordingly. It’s less so that objects are intended to break — functional planned obsolescence, if you will — but rather that consumer mindsets are oriented around finding the better object
