The Consumption of the Soul
“We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like.”
I
Last week I bought a new padel racket I didn’t need.
My old one was fine. But this one was newer, sexier, and more expensive. I walked out of the club flashing my new Adidas Metalbone, with all the boys looking on with admiration.
I had to have it. Not for the game. For what it signalled. For the feeling of being part of the group.
I’m not proud of that. But I’m also not surprised.
It doesn’t stop at rackets. I’m sitting here questioning whether I needed the expensive car I bought last year — the one that gives respect — when that money could have been saved. The honest answer is no. I wanted the feeling it promised.
It didn’t last.
It never does.
II.
What has capitalism done to my soul?
Not to the economy, the environment, or society in the abstract, but to my soul.
I can diagnose the system all I want, but the harder confession is this: I am not outside the machine. I am inside it. And the machine is inside me.
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls the world we’ve built the Achievement Society — a civilisation that replaced external discipline with internal compulsion. Nobody forces you to hustle.
You do it to yourself, freely, because you’ve been shaped to believe that relentless production and consumption are the same thing as being alive. We are no longer obedience-subjects, Han writes, but achievement-subjects — entrepreneurs of ourselves, forever optimising, performing, acquiring.
The whip is internal now. And it is merciless.
I feel this as a daily experience, not an abstraction. The restlessness when I’m not doing something. The vague guilt of stillness. The way motion — any motion, even buying a racket I don’t need — briefly quiets the noise.
Han calls it the compulsion of production: a nervous hunger that hurries us from one thing to the next, never arriving, never completing. Because completion would mean stopping. And stopping feels dangerously close to dying.
I meditate in the mornings. I read the mystics. I write about presence. The Bhagavad Gita tells me to detach from the fruits of my actions. Iris Murdoch tells me to lose the self in something greater. Epictetus tells me to distinguish what is mine from what is not.
And still, the reflex persists — a groove worn so deep that even when you know it’s there, your feet find it anyway.
III.
In the 1970s, psychologist Bruce Alexander built Rat Park — a large, enriched environment with ample space, social contact, and freedom. He gave rats a choice between normal water and heroin-laced water. The rats in Rat Park barely touched the drugs. However, the isolated rats, not in the Rat Park, but in small cages, drank until they died.
Same rats. Same drug. Different environment.
Addiction isn’t about the substance.
It’s about the cage.
I think about this often. Not because I consider myself an addict, but because I recognise the cage — cities designed to funnel you from home to work and back, consumption the only available comfort in between. No nature. No third places. No infrastructure that doesn’t require you to spend money to belong somewhere.
The environment creates the need. The corporations provide the solution. Then they tell you it’s your fault for needing it.
IV.
The erosion isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t announce itself.
It creeps.
It’s the gradual replacement — first your time, then your attention, then your identity — until you’re reaching for your phone not because you want anything specific, but because you don’t know what else to do with a quiet moment.
Stillness has become suspicious. The brand promise was never about the product. It’s about the feeling: you’re not enough, but you could be. Your brain learns this. Dopamine fires. The pathway deepens. The pattern repeats.
Starbucks becomes your third place. Amazon becomes your intimacy. Tinder gamifies your loneliness and sells it back to you as choice. None of it fills the actual hole — the one carved by isolation, by hostile cities, by a system that profits from your chronic low-level misery.
V.
I’m 57. I’ve read Gibran, Hesse, and Bukowski. I’ve sat with the Stoics, had sessions with therapists, and found real grace on mountain trails.
And I still feel the pull.
Here’s what makes it worse: the people around me don’t see any of this. The friends, the colleagues, the social circles — they play the game cheerfully, unconsciously, without question. New cars, new rackets, new watches. Status performed and returned like a handshake.
Being around them is like osmosis. The current pulls, the water flows toward least resistance, and without deciding to, I find myself drawn back — spending, signalling, consuming — as if my private convictions dissolve the moment I enter a room full of people who have never once asked whether any of this is making them whole.
That gap — between who I am in solitude and how I behave in company — is perhaps the most corrosive thing of all.
VI.
Murdoch wrote about the “fat, relentless ego” — the part of the mind that never stops narrating, comparing, grasping. She believed beauty could silence it. A kestrel hovering outside the window. A view from a mountain peak. A moment where the world becomes larger than your problems.
I’ve had those moments — on early mornings before the city wakes, on hillsides with nothing but wind and birdsong. They’re the opposite of consumption: they give without taking, fill without emptying.
But they require something the modern world is engineered to deny you — time that belongs to no one. Space that isn’t monetised. Attention that isn’t harvested.
The system doesn’t want you to have a kestrel moment. It wants you to convert that stillness into a purchase, a post, a subscription.
VII.
I don't have a solution.
What I have is this: the moment you see the cage clearly, something in you refuses to settle for it entirely. That refusal, however small, is where you begin.
Simone Weil wrote that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity — she meant it toward others, but I’ve come to believe it applies equally to the self. To notice why you’re reaching — really reaching — is a radical act in a world engineered to keep you reaching without ever asking why.
The grey concrete isn’t accidental. The absence of parks, public squares, places you can simply be without spending — that’s not neglect. Its design.
VIII.
The rain is falling as I write this.
I’m thinking about the person who goes to Starbucks every morning. Same time, same drink, same routine — not because they love the coffee, but because the system has given them nothing else that reliable, that consistent, that available. I don’t judge them. I am them, some days.
But I’m trying, however imperfectly, to build my own Rat park. A life rich enough that the brands lose their grip. You can’t escape the system entirely — not without going full Chris McCandless, the young man who gave away his savings, burned his cash, and walked alone into the Alaskan wilderness to live off the land. He died there at 24. A cautionary tale, or a martyrdom, depending on how you read it. Either way, not a blueprint.
What’s left is resistance. Quiet, daily, embodied resistance. A vote for presence over consumption. For depth over stimulation. For the self that existed before the algorithm learned its shape.
That self is still here.
I can feel it on mornings like this one.
And that, for now, is enough.