Modern life is organized around economic principles and the current dominant principle is consumerism; in which the act of accumulating, not the object, is supposed to create satisfaction, and is based on the assumption that one can (and should) have the best of everything.
The term for this is maximization, and belief in it is required for consumerism to flourish. It became widespread with the baby-boomers, the first generation to feel as if an infinite number of options were cheaply available for every choice. Previously, the standard principle was not maximization but satisficing; the assumption that the cheapest, easiest, or most available option that meets a need is indeed the best choice.
Maximizers operate from an assumption that, given a functionally limitless number of options, no matter what choice one makes, there is always a better option.
We have grown up in this environment of dissatisfaction, raised by a generation of maximizers. We have watched them accumulate self-help books, divorces, and staggering personal debt in the service of maximization. We were brought up to believe that any new source of options was a positive thing. They have told us that we, as a generation, can be, do and have absolutely everything. We are not buying it.
We admit that, statistically, there is always a better option, but we assert that it is also true that your chances of locating any better option, or the best option, is vanishingly small. Maximization does not take into account the cost of the search for that better choice. Satisficing, on the other hand, takes into account both the incredibly small chance of finding a better option and the cost of searching for it. So we declare ourselves to be satisficers, and we will not live and suffer as they have done, in the grip of a mania for maximization.
We know that maximization does not lead to its promised individuality, but instead to the tyranny of sameness. We will no longer attempt to run our lives as, or view ourselves as, corporations, serving the twin demiurges of efficiency and growth-at-all-costs. Our pride will not be in our possessions, but in ourselves, our skills and our personalities.
We choose to see actual objects, instead of lists of operations to be performed in order to maximize them, or lists of better options we think we know of.
We choose personality over productivity, family over colleagues, maintaining instead of replacing, ingenuity over purchasing power.
We choose doing the same work faster over doing more work in the same time, creating and producing over buying and selling, living more over working more, and we choose saving over borrowing.
We will remember that whatever we do today will cost us a day of our lives, and we will not confuse the symbol with the thing. We will simply live.
Tags: consumerism, manifesto, Modern Life, satisficing
These are the ramblings of 
Hooray. Well said.
c.
agreed, very well written. in a similar vein, seth godin (ironically, an alpha marketer) wrote a great post about spending quality time on less projects that actually mean something, rather than taking on every project that comes along. the tradeoff is less money, but more time spent on the things that matter. a worthy philosophy for everyone to embrace.