You Are What You Consume

Author: Noah Smith · Published: April 16, 2026 · URL: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/you-are-what-you-consume

One-line: The standard story — that your job makes you you, and your consumption is dictated to you by corporations — is exactly backwards; and if AI takes the jobs, that inversion is the available answer to the meaning crisis.

Summary

The essay starts at a cheese counter in a Long Island Whole Foods in the early 2010s, where Smith noticed how completely the culture had trained him to locate identity in production. “What do you do?” is the first question in San Francisco; Americans introduce each other by occupation; Japanese by employer. Movies make a career the axis of a life. Consumption, meanwhile, has a whole vocabulary of contempt attached — “lazy,” “shiftless,” “playboy” — and a hobby is always less noble than a calling.

He notes that this is one of the rare beliefs the left and right share. Twentieth-century leftists decried the consumer society and demanded that workers run things; conservatives praise the work ethic and suspect the welfare state of making people lazy; degrowth asks Westerners to consume less with a moralism that exceeds the environmental argument. “Production is virtuous, consumption is wicked.”

Two explanations for why society praises production on top of paying for it. The cynical one: praise is a cheaper currency than wages. Research in economics and psychology shows people accept lower salaries for work they believe is socially good, which is why nonprofit pay is low, why professors trade income for status, and possibly why tech companies tell young employees that selling ads is making the world a better place. The less cynical one: in premodern economies most work wasn’t market-rewarded, so families and villages paid for productive effort in compliments, and the habit outlived the conditions.

Then the inversion. Advertising is not mind control; merchants are “begging you to buy their brand instead of their competitors’. Everyone wants your money; you are the one who gets to choose who gets it.” Every day as a consumer you make dozens of forced choices — Starbucks or Peet’s, Marvel or indie, this newsletter or that one — and each one makes you interrogate your own preferences. He cites Cheek et al. (2022), where larger assortments made participants feel their choices were more self-expressive “regardless of whether larger sets actually enabled participants to better satisfy their preferences,” and Nanakdewa et al. (2021), on the psychological effects of merely framing actions as choices.

Production doesn’t work that way, because the market gets a vote: “If what you really want to do all day is carve wood, but the market doesn’t pay a woodcarver a living wage, then you’ll have to find something else to do for money.” Salaries are a readout of someone else’s preferences. Even self-expressive jobs are bundles — Smith concedes he could earn much more by writing what the audience wants, and the income he forgoes for self-expression is itself a form of consumption, which is why artists who sell out enjoy the craft less.

The compressed version: “When you decide what to consume, you ask: ‘What do I want?’. When you decide what to produce, you ask: ‘What do other people want me to do?’.” The former individuates; the latter doesn’t. At the societal level, the World Values Survey shows richer countries weighting self-expression more, and survey evidence that Japan stopped being collectivist by the early 1980s, once a generation grew up affluent.

The AI turn is the reason he finally wrote it. He agrees the disruption will cause a crisis of meaning — the economist whose hard algebra is now a button press, the engineer whose job is reviewing Claude’s code at a higher salary and lower pride. But he doesn’t think it has to. His model for a consumption-anchored identity is college: a stretch of life where work was done for enrichment rather than money, and where people learned what music they liked, how to make friends, how to express themselves. He is explicit that he was lucky and that the American university system is not fair. The proposal is to universalize and extend it — “if we create robust institutions to redistribute the material gains from the intelligence explosion,” a life where people read interesting books, do math for fun, play in amateur bands and argue about meaning until 4 AM.

“That’s a vision of a consumption society, but not one that’s meaningless or empty. Instead, it’s a vision of technology freeing us to become more like ourselves.”

Full text

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Connections

• Noah Smith — author; the piece is the most personal thing in the Noahpinion run, and its argument is deliberately cross-partisan.
• Content Consumption — the concept page this is the strongest single source for: consumption as an act of self-definition rather than a passive intake.
• Attention Economy — the counter-case Smith is arguing against, that choice among brands is manufactured rather than expressed.
• Artificial Intelligence and Automation — the occasion for the essay; the meaning crisis is taken seriously and then answered rather than dismissed.
• Taste — the mechanism by which repeated small consumption choices train a habit of self-examination.
• Learning — college as the existing proof-of-concept for a consumption-anchored identity, with the fairness objection conceded up front.