Capitalism Isn’t Blocking Your Spiritual Growth—You Are.

The misunderstood magic behind capitalism is it incentivizes businesses to produce what you want—for better or worse.

The Indian spiritual guru Sadhguru jokes that America is where spirituality goes to die. "When anything comes to America," he warns, "it takes on a different form." He offers the example of yoga. In the Indian tradition, yoga is about "union": to practice yoga is to enter a state of such complete oneness with the outside world that we "obliterate the boundaries of our individuality." But in the United States, we've watered it down into things like goat yoga and beer yoga. As Sadhguru quips, beer yoga is for "Yogis who have [a] drinking problem and drinkers who have [a] Yogi problem."

The idea that America is where spirituality goes to die doesn't hold 100% of the time, but there's more than a kernel of truth to it. The consumerism that dominates our society seems to crowd out meaningful spiritual connection. Or to put it another way: consumerism is where real spirituality goes to die. Before we go into why this is, let's define consumerism. Investopedia defines it this way: 

Consumerism…