Rational activity involves both ends and means.  In a technological age we acquire an increasing grasp of the means to our goals, and a decreasing grasp of the reasons why we should pursue them.  The clarity of purpose that I observed in Homer’s Odysseus is not a clarity about means:  it is a clarity about ends, about the things that are worth doing for their own sake, like grieving and loving and honoring the gods.  The mastery of means that emancipated mankind from drudgery has brought with it a mystery of ends - an inability to answer, to one’ sown satisfaction, the question what to feel or do.  The mystery deepens with the advent of the consumer society, when all the channels of social life are devoted to consumption.  For consumption, in its everyday form, is not really and end.  It destroys the thing consumed and leaves us empty-handed:  the consumer’s goals are perpetually recurring illusions, which vanish at the very moment they loom into view, destroyed by the appetite that seeks them.  The consumer society is therefore phatasmagoric, a place in which the ghosts of satisfactions are pursued by the ghosts of real desires.

Roger Scruton, from An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture, page 32