You did not choose to want the things you want. That is the central, uncomfortable truth of this book.

The Consumption Trap reveals that modern consumption is not a matter of personal weakness, poor discipline, or cultural fashion. It is a self-sustaining feedback loop — a dynamical system that traps individuals and entire civilizations in endless cycles of desire, acquisition, and disappointment. Drawing on rigorous research in behavioral economics, dynamical systems theory, and ecological science, Boris Kriger shows how this loop operates with the precision of a mathematical attractor: once inside it, no amount of willpower can pull you out, because the system is designed to regenerate the wanting it pretends to satisfy.

From the hedonic treadmill to the advertising industry's quiet reprogramming of human desire, from the paradox of socialist scarcity producing the same consumer frenzy as capitalist abundance, to the mathematical proof that infinite economic growth on a finite planet is not merely unwise but structurally impossible—this book takes the reader on a journey from diagnosis to cure. It asks what an economy would look like if it worked the way a living body works: distributing resources where they are needed, not where the loudest bid is placed. It proposes artificial intelligence not as a ruler or a surveillance tool, but as a neutral circulatory system for civilization. And it offers a transitional path—universal basic income funded by a transaction tax so small you would never notice it—toward a world measured not by how much it produces, but by how well its people actually live.