Your post reminds me of this quote about how a teacher’s assumptions affect identity:
“When those who have the power to name and to socially construct reality choose not to see you or hear you … when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked in the mirror and saw nothing.” —Adrienne Rich, 1984
“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.