“For the consumers in the society of consumers, being on the move — searching, looking for, not-finding-it or more exactly not-finding-it-yet is not a malaise, but the promise of bliss; perhaps it is the bliss itself. Theirs is the kind of traveling hopefully which makes arriving into a curse. … Not so much the greed to acquire and possess, not the gathering of wealth in its material, tangible sense, as the excitement of the new and unprecedented sensation is the name of the consumer game. Consumers are first and foremost gatherers of sensations; they are collectors of things only in a secondary and derivative sense.”
– Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 83.
Bauman’s work I think is so relvant to current theological discussion but for some reason he seems to be hardly mentioned in N. America while across the pond he is something of a celebrity. This piece on consumerism is really insightful.