You can see how the lifestyle of minimalists is kind of frowned upon in these cultures. While not everyone who is a minimalist is a meditator, I am quite sure monks are minimalists to the purest sense, especially renunciates. Just look at how the Millennial generation is being attacked by not being consumers of baby boomer industries! They're given shit for being decoupled from the system. Heaven forbid you choose to be a non joiner.
Of course it's detrimental, because this culture focuses on consumerism for two central reasons. First, the system is designed in perpetual short-term gains: every quarter must surpass the last, and if it doesn't it is doomsday. Nowhere are we asking the issues of consistently passing Ecological Debt Day, which if we are to assume trends of past years is anything, we would have wasted the annual "carrying capacity" of the Earth's resources by the start of August.
The other reason is far more sinister. By being a jobs cult culture, many people are likely doing things they see no value in -- what they do is "empty" in a genuinely dark sense, not the liberating "nonself" sense -- so they consume to fill the voids in their lives. This can be seen as an issue even beyond consumption but how people use their off time: how often are people just recharging after work, on days off, or even on vacation simply because what they do is so wasteful and draining to their lives? I don't simply mean people relaxing by a pool, I mean people who don't want to do anything, that they're burnt out. Days off in this sense or more like being in a social hospital room, for the sole goal is to recuperate enough health, primarily mental health, to get back out there.
This system absolutely emphasizes a sense of lack as its modus operandi from the end of the business to the people living in the society. And its in this manufacturing lack that we face profound issues: how many realize by being an American today they are part of the most prosperous period of human history? This is not seen in the lives of the majority, so something's gone wrong, and it's much more nuanced than the Great Decoupling, the creation of a precariat class once neoliberalism became the norm, but how we've truly, even in a material sense, concocted a society of emptiness, of voidness, both in personal lack and even material lack. One honest look at the world and you see these are mental and policy problems, and not a true, materialistic lack.
One look at technology is proof of this. In what culture can the idea of robots "taking our jobs" be seen as a normal thought to have? Where the response is genuine fear, hostility, and concern? What's gone wrong in a culture where the creation of better abundance is somehow a forced social death for tens of millions of people?
