Environment/sustainability questions aside (the need not be tied to our consumption behaviors) the trick to having your cake and eating it too is to decouple consumption decision-making from living life itself. Hence consumption-automation.
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If you can trust you fridge to reorder milk when you're close to running out, *you* can relax and take it as slow or as frenzied as you actually want to that moment. Automation also makes engineering sustainability easier (reduce waste, close material flow loops etc).
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Consumption automation also implies budget management automation. Bringing the idea of "pay yourself first" (a slogan common in the US that means "automate deposits in retirement savings") to all your spending, but without getting into unsustainable spending.
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Fortunately the bar to beat there, at least in the US (and possibly most of the west) is low... people suck at living within their means and avoiding credit card/other debt traps. Automated consumption is likely to do better than humans do.
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Like driverless cars but for personal finance. This tech needs to be invented, since all automation is for/by the forces designed to get people into debt traps rather than into a healthy financial state.
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Post-capitalism challenge is to invent a way to do 3 things at once: a) keep pace of economic life as fast as it needs to be via consumption automation b) use the automation to make it sustainable environmentally c) decouple pace of human life from pace of economic engines
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Replying to @vgr
You can automate the decision to purchase goods, but that just gets you to "what service or experience should I consume next".
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Replying to @mrgunn
It might yes, but it's not as much of an opportunity/temptation rich environment.
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Replying to @vgr
In the sense that I can purchase many goods simultaneously whereas I can only experience one thing at a time, maybe, but there's still the same sort of economic pressure, so I don't see how good purchase automation necessarily decouples economic growth from daily living.
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Replying to @mrgunn
Anecdotally it does happen when you manage to delegate most routine spending to another human, so in principle automatable.
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In my case, basically only personal spending I do is reload my starbucks app every few weeks. Everything else my wife handles. It's almost as good as being rich and having a chief of staff :) Business spending has a different psychological structure so I don't mind managing that
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