If you change "money" to "money/time/effort", then you'll find a lot of mundane examples:

• Lawncare, which you toil/pay a lot just to get a useless green carpet in front of your overpriced house to impress neighbors whose names you don't know
• Houses, which people treat as a trophy and an investment (despite the fact that houses don't provide a cash-flow and require constant maintenance) and which are overpriced by at least 2x
• Vehicles whose exhaust/stereo are at least twice as loud as they need to be in order to make the driver feel big and strong, but which only serves to aggravate most other people
• Clothing that emphasizes the shape of your body in order to attract people, many of whom are only interested in superficial relationships and will either abuse or neglect you (this applies to men and women)
• A job, which provides a paycheck that barely keeps you from becoming homeless, but which absorbs all of your time/effort, pours tons of stress into your soul, and which gradually shortens your lifespan (due to the stress and time wasted)
• Arguing with randos when they say something that makes you angry, but which in fact doesn't matter because they're just thinking out loud and aren't going to do anything

For me personally not at all. I don't buy stuff I don't need, I do have a credit card but never payed interest for it and don't think I do anything in my life to impress others. Thinking about all my purchases last year I don't think there was a single item where I had anybody but myself in mind.

So no, I don't think any of the 3 applies. I also think there are lots of people out there in the western world where this doesn't apply.

Maybe unhinged consumerism just has more attention than there actually is, that's only my guess at least.

It is true for a huge chunk of the western population. Sad, but true.

It's not at all relevant to me. The closest we get is occasionally buying baby or little kid stuff that ends up not being that useful, but we did it with money we had and not to impress anyone.

If that is you, stop it. You're making the world a slightly worse place.

I’m trying to make it less true every day :)

Not me. Unless you mean education. Lots of people buy education they don't need (don't use the skills in future career), with money they don't have (loans), to impress people they don't like (their employers)

I rarely buy something I don't need, but "need" is highly subjective and in comparison to the next best alternative. A lot of people buy what seems to others to be useless crap because the alternative is to have your money's value eroded by inflation. Once I learned that I can buy a better form of money, the next best alternative changed. Same thing for when I learned to invest in stocks. If stocks are overpriced I might go for some bitcoin. If bitcoin is hitting all time highs, I might buy stocks that month. The more alternatives you know how to use to your benefit the more resilient you'll be.

Also, sometimes I buy things I might not want to hold because they're capital goods. I need two cars so that my wife and I can get to work. We could get by with one or even zero, but we concluded that two cars is a good investment because it saves us a bunch of time that we can use to gain more utility than we lost from buying the cars.

Maybe 20 years ago. This definitely isn't me now.

It would be ironic to say it as someone who is an acolyte of the IKEA nesting instinct.

I love things, especially fast computers and outoor/survival/tactical gear, but instinct, or maybe being more clever than most of my past abusers, and getting cognitive dissonance over their programs, always made me wary of anyone trying to persuade me of anything. Because in my life, that's usually a red flag for "prepare to lose another piece of yourself".

I buy things I need with money I have sweated for today in the hope I survive to put one foot in front of the other tomorrow.
I want to live, not survive, but ain’t there yet…. Not frivolous spends on minimum wage.

I buy things that bring my joy with money I’ve already saved to impress myself.

Not really, and I think most bitcoiners won't live a life like that

This is a topic that demands reflection! Advertising machines do their job well... convince you that you need that product. Yes, they do it in several cunning ways.

Yes. Because we indentify as legal persons. And persons have personalities and statuses to mantain, personas to play.
A living man just lives.

Definitely relevant to today's society in general, less relevant to people on this board perhaps. Fiat currency demands continual expansion of credit for its survival. Happy people who are content with themselves and their lives do not consume as much and therefore are a danger to the survival of the fiat experiment. Fiat bankers must therefore create a society of unhappy, unfulfilled drones who think that consumption of goods they cannot afford and do not need will fulfil them. It never will, but it will keep the experiment going and enrich the cantillionaires.
Theres a good book called 'Affluenza: the all consuming epidemic' that describes it very well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affluenza:_The_All-Consuming_Epidemic

not relevant

Plebs are living on the bear neccesities like Whinnie the Pooh

I buy sats to support people I 🧡 with fiat I earned 🙂