“The time [sic] of consumerism I advise against is the kind of consumerism that seems to make people unhappy according to the specific research papers I cited.”
When writing an essay about achieving happiness, it’s not very helpful to define a term as inherently causing happiness or unhappiness, even if you can point to the literature for clarification. You end up with the tautology that “doing X—which is defined as causing happiness—makes you happy” or the inverse.
The rest of the essay is a rather nice survey of achieving happiness; I’ll be sure to point some friends at it.
Sorry if this was unclear. Nobody is defining consumerism as causing unhappiness. It’s an empirical claim that certain kinds of consumerism cause unhappiness, and those are the kinds of consumerism I’m advising against.
“The time [sic] of consumerism I advise against is the kind of consumerism that seems to make people unhappy according to the specific research papers I cited.”
When writing an essay about achieving happiness, it’s not very helpful to define a term as inherently causing happiness or unhappiness, even if you can point to the literature for clarification. You end up with the tautology that “doing X—which is defined as causing happiness—makes you happy” or the inverse.
The rest of the essay is a rather nice survey of achieving happiness; I’ll be sure to point some friends at it.
Sorry if this was unclear. Nobody is defining consumerism as causing unhappiness. It’s an empirical claim that certain kinds of consumerism cause unhappiness, and those are the kinds of consumerism I’m advising against.
I fixed the typo, thanks.