Anti-Consumerism

The basis for the entire book relies on rejecting material goods. The narrator talks about how he personally picked out his sofa, his china and his coffee table. These things served as a comfort to him. Once he made decisions about those, they became permanent parts of his life. It is a keeping up with the Joneses mentality that fuels consumerism. This idea that people must have certain possessions keeps them going and distracted by what is really going on. People in the lower ranks of society think that if they work hard, they can buy all these things as if the things define who they are.

A major point in the book is that your things do not define who they are, instead they distract from who you really are. Tyler's idea is to free yourself from your possessions and then look at who you are when...