I read Mona Lazar fairly regularly. I often disagree with her, sometimes substantially, but that is part of why I keep reading. A good writer does not owe the reader agreement. A good writer owes the reader something worth thinking about, and disagreement with an intelligent point is often more valuable than agreement with an obvious one.
Her recent essay, Why Nothing You Buy Feels Good Anymore, certainly gave me something to think about. But this time I did not find myself disagreeing with her answer. I rejected the question. Near the end of the essay, Lazar writes:
“Buying things doesn’t feel good anymore because it was never designed to make you feel good. It was designed to keep you consuming.”
There is the problem.
But not for the reasons she states.
Who said buying things was supposed to make you feel good in the first place?
Not Amazon. Not Jeff Bezos. Not the product. Not the algorithm. You gave the purchase that job. You decided an external thing was responsible for producing an internal condition, and when it failed at a job it never had, you blamed the external.
That is not a problem with shopping. It is a problem with judgment.
You Gave It the Job
The essay is filled with examples of this inversion of responsibility.
“Bezos took the joy right out of shopping.”
Did he? Or did you place your joy somewhere Bezos could reach it?
“You didn’t find that product. It found you.”
No. An algorithm placed something in front of you. What happened next still required your participation.
“You can impulse-buy a 4K TV at 3AM while lying in bed, eating expired Oreos.”
Exactly. Impulse buy. Your impulse. Your purchase. Your judgment. Your fault.
Even the disappointing UberEats order is described as though lukewarm food simply materialized at the door and imposed disappointment upon its victim. You ordered it. You chose what significance to give the experience. You remain the rational agent throughout the entire transaction.
This is not an argument that corporations do not manipulate, algorithms do not influence, advertising does not persuade, or technology does not alter behavior. Of course they do. Some are extraordinarily effective at doing exactly that.
Influence is not sovereignty.
Epictetus understood the distinction nearly two thousand years before Amazon:
“What decides whether a sum of money is good? The money is not going to tell you; it must be the faculty that makes use of such impressions—reason.”
—Epictetus, Discourses 1.1.5, trans. Robert Dobbin
The money does not tell you what the money means. Neither does the television, the phone, the delivery app, the advertisement, or the algorithm. The external presents itself. You form judgments about it. You decide what it means, what it is worth, whether to pursue it, and—most importantly—whether your happiness depends upon getting it.
Lazar actually reaches this truth herself: “Unfortunately, you’ve trained your brain...”
Yes. You trained it.
She writes elsewhere that “You’re just chasing the feeling of maybe, possibly wanting it.”
Yes. You are chasing it.
But then the essay repeatedly retreats from that recognition. Eventually “you trained your brain” becomes “you’ve been trained to always want more.” Agency disappears again. The consumer becomes the object upon which Amazon, advertising, algorithms, convenience, abundance, and dopamine act.
Stoicism refuses that retreat.
This same abdication now appears everywhere. The algorithm destroyed my attention. Social media made me miserable. AI is making us stupid. Amazon made me buy.
No.
An algorithm can compete aggressively for your attention. You still decide whether it gets it. Social media can present an endless supply of material for comparison. You still make the judgment that someone else’s life diminishes yours. AI can answer almost any question you put before it. If you therefore stop questioning, reasoning, learning, and thinking for yourself, AI did not seize your intellectual sovereignty.
You surrendered it—willingly.
And then you blamed the algorithm, the AI, the Bezos, the iPhone for stealing it. That distinction is uncomfortable because sovereignty carries responsibility with it. If Amazon did this to you, Amazon must change. If the algorithm did this to you, the algorithm must change. If AI made you stupid, AI must somehow be restrained before you can think again.
But if the decisive judgment remains yours, the responsibility returns to the only place where you can actually exercise it.
Yourself.
I Stopped Asking Whether It Would Make Me Happy
There is a personal reason I reject Mona’s entire way of framing the problem. I no longer ask whether a choice will make me happy. In fact, I’ve stopped connecting choices and actions to happiness because it doesn’t work that way and it never did.
Not because Stoicism has made me perpetually happy. It hasn’t. I am not even sure I am happier than I was before I began taking Stoicism seriously. What has changed is the question I ask before I act.
Is this wise? Is it courageous? Is it just? Is it temperate?
Then I try to act accordingly and leave happiness to attend to itself.
Sometimes the result feels good. Sometimes it doesn’t. I have made choices I believe were right that hurt enormously. I have exercised restraint when indulgence would have been considerably more pleasant. I have fulfilled duties I did not enjoy fulfilling. None of that demonstrates a failure of Stoicism, because producing a pleasant emotional state was never the objective.
That changes surprisingly ordinary decisions.
Do I need a $1,000 phone when the one in my hand works perfectly well? No. Not because expensive phones are evil, but because in that circumstance I would be practicing excess for the sake of excess, and that guides my judgment. Should I buy a house I cannot reasonably afford because possessing it excites me? No. That is not wisdom. Should I eat or drink past moderation because doing so feels good for a few hours? No. The pleasure does not get to make the decision. I make the decision, based on Stoic virtue, and pleasure and happiness come or they don’t. Those are not mine to decide.
I don’t need Amazon to stop tempting me before I can stop buying things I don’t need. I don’t need an algorithm to become less effective before I can govern my attention. I don’t need consumer culture to reform itself before I can exercise temperance.
I can simply say no. And I do.
And I can say yes deliberately.
I don’t order food through delivery apps. I go to my local butcher. I know him. We talk. I buy food whose quality I know and cook it myself because I enjoy cooking. Once a week I go to the farmers’ market. I walk through it slowly, look at what is available, decide deliberately what I actually want to buy rather than waiting for something to manufacture the desire for me.
I am not claiming this lifestyle will make anyone happier. That is precisely the point. I am not looking for a better mechanism for extracting pleasant feelings from consumption. I am trying to exercise virtuous judgment over what I consume.
There is an enormous difference between those things.
If every advertisement that reaches me creates a desire I must satisfy, if every product placed before me becomes something I must consider owning, if every impulse demands action, then convenience has not made me free. It has merely made obedience easier.
Epictetus had a word for a person governed by things outside his rational control.
Slave.
The Product Owes You Nothing
Lazar ends her essay with this:
“You’re not failing at happiness. You’re just living in a reality where every pleasure has been turned into a product, and every product comes with diminishing emotional returns.”
No.
That is the premise I reject.
The product does not come with diminishing emotional returns because the product owes you no emotional return at all.
It is a thing.
Use it. Enjoy it. Prefer it. Admire it. Buy it if reason tells you it is worth buying. Walk away from it if reason tells you otherwise. But the moment you assign that thing responsibility for your happiness, satisfaction, identity, or sense that life is going well, you have done something far more consequential than make a purchase.
You have surrendered authority.
This is why Epictetus begins not with Amazon, advertising, inequality, algorithms, or dopamine, but with the distinction between what belongs to us and what does not. And a few sections later he states the mechanism plainly:
“Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the views which they take of things.”
—Epictetus, Enchiridion 5
That is the entire argument. Jeff Bezos can sell you something. He cannot decide what possessing it means. An algorithm can place something before you. It cannot make you need it. An advertisement can attempt to manufacture desire. It cannot compel assent. AI can produce an answer. It cannot force you to stop thinking. Someone else can possess ten times what you possess. Their wealth cannot make yours inadequate. A product can become familiar and cease to excite you. It has not taken anything from you. It never promised to maintain your excitement in the first place.
The external presents itself. The impression arrives. Then judgment begins.
That last part is ours, and it’s the only thing that is. When you try the old argument, “The devil made me do it,” you have surrendered the only authority that was ever properly yours—judgment.
This does not mean we are immune to manipulation, temptation, pleasure, disappointment, habit, or impulse. Stoicism makes no such childish claim. It means that none of those things acquire rightful sovereignty merely because they exert pressure. The first impression may arrive uninvited. What we assent to, what we pursue, what we practice, what we permit to become habitual, and what we allow to govern our lives remain matters for reason.
That is why blaming the external is so costly. Every time we say Amazon made me consume, the algorithm stole my attention, social media made me miserable, AI made me stupid, we describe ourselves as increasingly passive creatures acted upon by increasingly powerful things.
Stoicism insists on something much more demanding: you remain responsible for how you judge and act.
You are still the rational agent. You may have trained yourself badly. Train yourself differently. You may have surrendered your attention. Reclaim it. You may have allowed convenience to replace judgment. Start judging again. You may have cultivated appetites until they became difficult to resist. Practice restraint. You may have handed an external responsibility for your happiness. Take it back.
Then ask what Stoicism has always asked of you: What would wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance require now?
Not because doing so will necessarily make you happier. It may not. I do not practice Stoicism because it promises me a continuous supply of pleasant feelings. I practice it because I would rather govern myself well than feel good while being governed badly.
Wisdom. Courage. Justice. Temperance.
Those are my concern.
Happiness will attend to itself.
The tragedy of modern consumption is not that products have stopped making us happy. It is that we ever imagined happiness was their responsibility. We gave things authority they never possessed, demanded emotional returns they never owed us, and then declared ourselves victims when they failed to deliver.
The thing did not fail.
You gave it the wrong job.
You gave it that authority.
You can take it back.
That is sovereignty.
Thanks to Mona Lazar for the inspiration.