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Is This All There Really Is?

Is this all there really is? Life is full of fear and desire. For some, fear and desire are defined differently. For others it means the same. Why are we enslaved by a consumer society? I say it's because we feel that it is all we have; or is it because it's what we are taught to love since the day we are born. The allure of consumerism is appealing to us. We were always told that if we work hard and strive for the best then we could obtain anything our hearts desire; we could live the "American dream", which is sometimes looked at as being the standard way of living. Uniformity when we are born is how I look at it. Striving for success, is the way to achieve the "American dream" But it seems that to become this dream, to have these things that matter so much, we have to sell our souls to the corporate world. But not everyone can be this. The dehumanizing effects of the corporate world can be what makes or breaks you. With the corporate world comes the realization that you aren't who you were before. You are no longer an individualist, you are no longer authentic. You are who they say you are and you think how they have trained you to think. In Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, all of these ideas and more are evident. I hope to establish the evidence of these ideas being present and explain my views of them. Why? Because I want to establish that there is more to life than living like the world wants you to live. Life is what you make it.
The narrator in Fight Club is a prime example of living and breathing the corporate world and the emotionally deadening appeal of "useless shit." His desire is the Ikea catalog which holds all the funky, new consumer goodies which he believes is the gateway to a good life, but they never really satisfy. At one point in the movie this is all he is concerned with. When his condo is somehow blown to pieces the only thing that he can think about is his cute little sofa and his wardrobe that was becoming respectable. For him that was...