I agree with the general spirit here, but the fact is that most of us vacillate between producer and consumer roles, and fill both to varying degrees.<p>The perverse irony of modern society is that it's orders of magnitude easier to be a consumer than a producer. I don't mean that producing requires more psychological investment and effort; that's a given, in any case. I mean that society makes it much easier to fill the role of the consumer than the producer. You can consume cheaply and easily, as if the world is begging people to consume.<p>Producing, in any meaningful, useful, and psychologically sustainable context, is very difficult. Most people don't get to do it. At the very least, you need an audience. Realistically, you also need people to pay you to produce, which means that your odds of getting meaningful work are long (unless you're the only one skilled enough to do the interesting work, the people with the money take the meaningful projects and throw you the scraps). Consequently, 85 percent of people cannot attain work that is more valuable or interesting than watching TV. This is why we're a nation of non-producing consumers.