The Niche Obsession Essay
Wandering Athens' marketplaces with nothing but a cloak and wooden staff, Diogenes started the Western world's controversial, long-standing obsession with anti-materialism. Living off of nature for 81 defiant years, a passerby gave him a new nickname: kyón, Greek for dog. Today, it's pronounced cynicism: Diogenes philosophized that rejecting materialism frees people.
More recently, before typing On The Road onto a 140-foot scroll, Kerouac drove across America's 1950s countryside jumping freights in a soul-search for meaning, abandoning consumerism just to feel something. A decade later, in Woodstock, Bob Dylan wrote: "Money doesn't talk, it swears." And in 1999, Tyler Durden ended Fight Club by bombing corporate infrastructure, symbolizing the emancipation of consumers.
Anti-materialism's popularity makes sense to me. We live through aphorisms like money can't buy happiness and believe fulfillment begins intrinsically. But if we're so cognisant of consumerism's illusions, then it's certainly odd that overconsumption has increased 2,100% since 1900. Case in point, as an economic-mobility researcher and a writer of philosophic commentaries, I should be burning the dollar. But I'm not. I run businesses zealously and feel incomplete without Spotify premium. Even Kerouac resorted to stealing goods to survive. That is to say, anti-materialism is presently unsustainable.
My inner-economist admires America's shared dependency, but I wish people could pursue fulfillment how they'd like, regardless of material. I don't have the answers. But at Dornsife, I want to find them and more by researching economics and philosophy, no matter if that involves speaking to a million people, or rereading Kerouac's 140-foot scroll.
What this one does
The fascination is the essay. Whether money matters is a question most people wave off in a sentence; he followed it from Diogenes through a few centuries of anti-materialists and then held himself to the same standard he held them. That depth of thought is on every line, and he was admitted to Berkeley and USC.
The essay is the student’s own writing, printed here unchanged.
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