Did you ever heard of 'reactive Purchase'?
Okay, let me give you an example. It will be as clear as air.
Suppose you are decorating your kitchen. And after that buy some new rack, a new oven may be and some dishes also; which you did not planned. It's all because you feel you need it but actually not. This is called Reactive purchase.
So the question here, is this a behavioral issues or an effect of consumerism? Actually I think this is a effect of both issues.
Life has a natural tendency to become filled with more. We want more and more and it makes us happy. This is a natural human behavior. But we should focus on, 'is this is affecting us negatively?' If so, there is many ways we can reduce this. But before talking about all that thing we should know what this also happens for today's consumerist market.
Like you buy a new dress, you are gonna end up buying new shoes, matching things and every other things you did not know you need or even exist. We are all consumer in this society and marketing people knows this very well. So every shop in the town, every online chains try to showcase every thing in such a way, we can not resist ourselves buying them. Also we started to thing all these are necessary and that's the best trend we should follow.
So this is all about mind set. If we are gonna make ourselves out of this the first thing we should do is, Reduce exposure. Yeah, it's hard in this social media society. We wanna show off every thing we got. But reducing our exposure may help us to get rid of it. We can focus on other things instead like showing our cooking skill instead of our kitchen makeover.
We should be in our self-imposed limit. There is nothing like to be in this circle. Self control and self help is the biggest thing we can do to fight against consumerism and our behavioral action.
I hope it helps a bit!