Christmas gifts, luxury dinners and end-of-year sales: we'll be shopping in December. As polluting as it is, Western countries have deliberately come to glorify consumption in this way. Stuff would bring us freedom and joy. Now it's time for a new ideal.

The lengthy excess that starts around Black Friday and that comes to a dazzling climax via Santa Claus and Christmas on New Year's Eve, around 70 million euros like Dutch people blast into the sky with fireworks?

“Why is it so difficult to only buy what you need?’

History has more to say about how this orgy of overconsumption became such an important part of our democratic society. This history begins in the Second World War, and mostly took place on the other side of the Atlantic.


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