something when 'feeling bad' about themselves." According to a summary of these studies in the Wall Street Journal, shopping serves as a means of "alleviating loneliness," "dispelling boredom," and "relieving depression." "They don't really need what they are shopping for. Often they don't even know what they're after." A survey of shoppers in malls indicates that only 25 percent come to buy a particular item.

Such evidence suggests that consumerism is a more serious threat to "traditional values" than the allegedly anticapitalist ideology of the new class. It suggests that the threat to those values, moreover, is not very fully or clearly described as a spirit of hedonism and self-indulgence that undermines the work ethic. The new class is just as addicted to work as to exercise and consumption. The intrinsic satisfactions in this work, to be sure, are usually overshadowed by external rewards—high salaries, social status, the expectation of promotion, frequent changes of scene. But there is no lack of willing, not to say compulsive, workers. What is missing is the kind of work that might evoke a sense of calling.

A calling, as opposed to a career, implies a belief in the intrinsic value of a given line of work. When goods are produced merely to satisfy the taste for novelty, it is difficult even for professionals to convince themselves that their work serves some pressing social need. When "people look at products as if they were mood-altering drugs," in the words of James Ogilvy, a market researcher, those who design and produce those products—or merely contribute indirectly to their manufacture and distribution—cannot help wondering whether their efforts really matter in the larger scheme of things. Even the computer industry has lost the sense of mission that animated it in the seventies, according to Dennis Hayes. Technological innovation is no longer "linked to the public good." Computer products are increasingly "ephemeral." "Volatile markets beckon, are saturated, overrun, made obsolescent, and forgotten as quickly as new product releases, or new markets, are created.... Computer work has become more and more detached from social contexts. A culture of product indifference and ignorance has engulfed the computer sophisticates."

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