Evergreen Reads to Empower Your Mind
The Standard Sister
Note no.25
History
December 7, 2025
Hello Stranger
The mesmerizing hurricane that arrives with Christmas is a phenomenon with no real beginning and no real end. Once, this atmosphere existed only in the physical world — decorated streets, glittering shop windows, the scent of pine — but in the digital age it has transformed into an economic behemoth hovering over everyone. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, gift lists: all of these drifted long ago from religion and tradition and became a season of uninterrupted consumption. Most people are preoccupied with one thing — buying more. And perhaps that “more” no longer belongs to Christmas at all, but has become a year-round state of being. This article traces the roots of consumer culture as we experience it today. Oh, and Merry Christmas.
Illustration by Ronald McLeod
How We Learned to Want What We Don’t Need
Article by The Standard Sister
Behind the whirlpool of constantly chasing the next purchase — the better thing, the newer thing lies a story far deeper than shiny trends. It is the story of how human desire — rarely conscious — became the engine of entire economies. And like many modern stories, this one begins with Sigmund Freud and accelerates dramatically with his nephew, Edward Bernays — the man who shaped Western consumer culture as we know it today.
Freud was born in 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia (now the Czech Republic), and spent most of his life in Vienna as a physician and neurologist. His theory of the unconscious, the drives, the defense mechanisms, and the principles of the psyche — pleasure and reality — was designed to explain why human beings often behave against their own logic. In 1909 he gave a historic lecture at Clark University in the United States — a short visit with a deep and lasting impact. His ideas took root astonishingly fast in American soil, decades before he was forced to flee Vienna after the Nazi occupation and die in exile in London.
But the person who turned his psychoanalysis into a practical tool — and at times, a psychological weapon — was his nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays understood earlier than most that human beings are not driven by rational needs but by emotional impulses; that most of our decisions happen below the surface; and that a symbol, an image, or an object can awaken a drive long before we notice it.
Propaganda Book Cover
This is where Freud’s distinction between need and drive enters. A need is physical, concrete, finite: food, warmth, safety. A drive is psychological, endless: a longing for belonging, for love, for prestige, for recognition. Needs disappear once they are satisfied. Drives do not. Freud argued that the psyche moves between two forces: the pleasure principle — which seeks immediate gratification; and the reality principle — which understands time, money, society, and the body as limiting factors. Between them operates sublimation: the mechanism that can take a raw impulse — sexuality, aggression, yearning — and translate it into something cultural, acceptable, even beautiful. Consumer culture operates almost entirely in the realm of drives. It speaks to the pleasure principle: “Buy now, feel good instantly.” It presses on the reality principle: “Limited-time offer,” “A smart investment in yourself.” And it uses sublimation: it’s not just a product — it’s you, your identity, your sense of worth. Bernays was the first true architect of this mechanism. He worked for corporate giants like Procter & Gamble, which even today holds hundreds of brands under one roof, and for luxury houses like Cartier, for whom he turned the wristwatch from a practical object into a symbol of status and the good life. One of his most astonishing demonstrations of influence was the massive national celebration he
Life Magazine Cover, 1922
Vintage Swift Ad,1950
orchestrated to mark the “Fiftieth Anniversary of the Electric Light” — a public-relations masterpiece that cemented Thomas Edison as theinventor of the light bulb. In reality, Edison patented and perfected the technology, but the core concept of the modern lamp rested on earlier work by Ami Argand. Thanks to Bernays, this nuance almost vanished from public memory; the myth became fact. With the same skill he used to shape myths, he also reshaped habits. In the 1920s, Americans typically ate a light breakfast. Bernays, working for a major meat company, transformed bacon and eggs into a “healthy” morning meal. He organized a petition signed by 5,000 physicians asserting the nutritional value of a heavy breakfast — and within a short time, the Western world adopted it as a national staple. This was his gift: taking a drive, wrapping it in a language of health, progress, or identity, and turning it into a cultural norm. The most famous case, of course, is women and cigarettes. In the 1920s, women did not smoke in public; it was considered unfeminine, even shameful. Bernays hired a female psychoanalyst to study the symbolism of the cigarette and discovered it was coded as a masculine symbol of power. So he staged an event in which women marched through New York City smoking openly — branding their cigarettes as “Torches of Freedom.” Within years, women across America began smoking en masse. Not because they needed cigarettes — but because they wanted the symbol. The freedom. The new identity. These tools were not adopted only by corporations. Bernays’s book, Propaganda (1928), became a formative text in shaping public opinion — to the horrifying extent that Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, used it, despite Bernays being Jewish. And so the modern Western world — especially American culture — became a society whose heartbeat is consumption. The modern Christmas, with its gifts and sales and endless lists, has become the prime excavation site of human drives. Yet the momentary meaning evaporates the instant the wrapping is torn open, and the drive — predictably — ignites again. The reason the psyche continues generating drives endlessly is that a drive, unlike a need, does not seek to reach a goal — but to move toward it. It is not a feeling or a preference, but a psychic energy seeking discharge. Biologically, the dopamine that motivates us is released not when we achieve something but in the anticipation of it; once the goal is reached, dopamine drops and the brain creates a new goal. This is an ancient survival mechanism: had we been satisfied with what we have, we would not have explored, wandered, invented. But the drive is also born from a lack that cannot truly be filled — belonging, love, recognition — and therefore it returns again and again. Lacan put it simply: the drive does not want the object; it wants itself. Not the acquisition, but the movement toward. When a drive is “fulfilled,” it ceases to be a drive — and another emerges in its place. Not as a flaw — but as part of the human structure that prefers momentum over satiation. This is why Christmas is merely the tip of the consumerist iceberg; one more example of how consumer culture has learned to trade in our unconscious. This season often feels like a small test of the world we live in — a world that encourages us to consume, buy, gift, add to cart at three a.m., but asks far fewer questions about why. Why are we buying, and what are we trying to prove? What does the new bag, the new car, the new phone, the next unnecessary purchase really symbolize? What are we trying to cover, signal, complete?
There is beauty in renewing, in buying, in nurturing and indulging ourselves. But just before we act on autopilot, it is worth remembering how all this began — and more importantly, deciding consciously how we want to take part in it today.