Here's a quote from Jacob Fisker from the book Early Retirement Extreme. I thought it was especially important given the time of year with New Year's Resolutions.
"We have an economic model that is based on pulling resources out of the ground and mostly turning them into unnecessary products, getting people to buy the products by convincing them that they need them, then getting them to throw the products away because they're obsolete. This makes people but the next model and bury the other one in the ground. The sole goal of this seemingly pointless exercise is to work faster and grow the GDP, which measures the resource churn."