I'd say it's because consumerism is a kind of brain rot all its own. The media landscape we've been living in for generations has sold us this ridiculous fantasy that happiness means owning (or at least temporarily renting) luxury goods.

The plurality, if not majority, of the population here has never had to adjust their expectations or really sit down and think hard about what's actually worth acquiring. We treat desires for convenience and novelty as though they are necessities. But they aren't.

What's actually a necessity is having something fulfilling to occupy your time, as a counterbalance to keep you sane, and that activity does not HAVE to be of the sort that costs a lot of money. Take up art using cheap supplies--just sketch with standard number two pencils on white lined notebook paper or perhaps play music on improvised instruments made of household objects. It doesn't have to be good in order to become meaningful and if you do it enough it'll BECOME good. Walk outside when the weather happens to be nice. Learn to ride a bicycle again. Visit a library. Pretend to sword fight with a friend using a fallen tree branch. You don't have to drop several grand on a resort vacation. You don't have to go into debt for a fancy car. You don't need to buy the latest edition of "triple a" micro transaction slop from so-called "studios" that don't give one single solitary wet shart about actual creativity and fire all their devs immediately every time a project wraps.

Money can't buy whimsy.

All it can do is, at best, remove obstacles from between you and being able to enjoy something. If it's not being used to simplify your life, then it's COMPLICATING your life: Giving you only empty distraction that does not provide your experience with any fertile ground for meaning. This is but one of the many ways we are socially "poisoned" and then told that conspicuous consumption is the antidote. It's not. it's just even more poison.

You know what the most enjoyable experience I had was in the past several months? Just sitting in the living room at a gathering of friends where everyone brought a little home made food and listening to their happy voices. It cost me next to nothing but turned out to be worth more than anything.

My computer is more than ten whole years old now but it handles old games i could find on sale just dandy and doesn't need some suped-up rtx gpu to let me pirate some shows XD

I stopped mindlessly gorging myself on junk food, and now basically only eat either efficient daily maintenance nutrition OR choose to visit a small locally owned restaurant no more than once per week. I'm never spending upwards of fifteen fucking dollars on a fast food burger "meal" ever again.

Divest of tacky opulence. Defy Wall Street and its siren song of ruin disguised as prosperity. Embrace the elegance of simplicity and spontaneity. If this sprawling parasitic infestation we've mistaken for an *economy" can't survive without sucking the life out of us all then maybe it deserves to collapse.