What’s at the root of modern American consumerism? It might not just be competition among the brands trying to sell us things, but also competition among ourselves.

An easy story to tell is that marketers and advertisers have perfected tactics to convince us to purchase things, some we need, some we don’t. And it’s an important part of the country’s capitalistic, growth-centered economy: The more people spend, the logic goes, the better it is for everybody. (Never mind that they’re sometimes spending money they don’t have, or the implications of all this production and trash for the planet.) People, naturally, want things.

But American consumerism is also built on societal factors that are often overlooked. We have a social impetus to “keep up with the Joneses,” whoever our own version of the Joneses is. And in an increasingly unequal society, the Joneses at the very top are doing a lot of the consuming, while the people at the bottom struggle to keep up or, ultimately, are left fighting for scraps.

It is funny a few weeks ago I was reading Henry David Thoreau's Walden, and he was pointing out how by even the 1830s, consumerism was a big thing, so much that it wasn't uncommon for families to regularly pile up their broken furniture and other detritus and have big ol' bonfires. Nowadays, while farmers and rednecks still do the bonfire thing, ordering up dumpsters for purges is a regular thing.