The Fat Smoker and the Consumer Society

post # 456 — October 29, 2007 — a Strategy and the Fat Smoker post

There’s a great blog called SLOW LEADERSHIP which picked up on the dilemmas I pose in Strategy and the Fat Smoker.

Here’s what it had to say:

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Somehow the consumer society manages to combine a puritanical obsession with working with a totally hedonistic devotion to getting whatever you want in as short a time as possible.

Yet capitalism itself is all about putting off gratification for the sake of greater long-term profit through investment. Instead of taking all their cash and having a truly memorable blow-out in some exotic location, entrepreneurs and capitalists are expected to invest their money and wait for bigger rewards some time in the future. Instant gratification is also the antithesis of America’s favorite attitude to life: the Puritan Work Ethic.

If you truly accepted having it all and having it now as your goal, you would never go to work. Somehow the consumer society manages to combine a puritanical obsession with working with a totally hedonistic devotion to getting whatever you want in as short a time as possible.

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A great analysis. Is there a way out of this culture?