Consumerism in a 250 Year Old Country

There’s a quip from the historian Will Durant, that a nation is born stoic and dies epicurean. (Location 538)

What hard work is there to be done in 2023? Has rampant consumerism subsumed our desire to struggle to create a more perfect Union?

…over time, this dynamic leads to a very small percentage of the population gaining and controlling exceptionally large percentages of the total wealth and power, then becoming overextended, and then encountering bad times, which hurt those least wealthy and least powerful the hardest, which then leads to conflicts that produce revolutions and/or civil wars. When these conflicts are over, a new world order is created, and the cycle begins again. (Location 361)

Will we ever be satisfied?