Your grandparents were what they did for a living. You are what you buy.
That’s Zygmunt Bauman’s idea (Polish-British sociologist, 1925 to 2017) about the shift from a society of producers to a society of consumers.
In the industrial one, identity came from your trade or profession, the goal was full employment, and being poor meant being out of work. In the consumer one (his “liquid modernity”), life projects are built on what you choose to buy. Being poor becomes being a flawed consumer: you’re left out not because you don’t produce, but because you can’t shop.
He worked this out for poverty in Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (1998). In Consuming Life (2007) he goes further: people turn into commodities themselves, at once the product and the salesperson, having to market themselves to be recognized. And the whole thing runs on a dissatisfaction that never quite ends, because a satisfied consumer stops consuming.
Your LinkedIn profile nods along.