I’m worried that I’m the only one who watches enough telly to see what’s going on here: the toy industry – and if that sounds niche, remember that this close to Christmas it stands as a proxy for production as a whole – is having some kind of systems collapse. Games that should never have made it past the planning stage – a plastic dachshund that craps yellow pellets and forces you to scoop them up with a shovel – stagger into their fifth year. Over-engineered, nylon-furred tat, going by the name Furbies, take an antisocial glee in the vexation they provoke. The Clever Keet is a plastic bird that mimics the experience of having a live pet, except it doesn’t in any way: it was designed with the unimaginable customer in mind who prefers it when the air is filled with banality.

Once, the whole point of an advertisement was to mask how rubbish the thing was. Now, an eye-bogglingly expensive dogbot gadget grinds across the screen, and you can see from 20 paces that it is disposable, clunky, pointless. I believe it’s a post-ironic statement that there isn’t really any point in anything, but I’m just guessing.

Keeping their upper lips stiff and their chins out, British retailers are claiming Black Friday as a win, since they all experienced some traffic-related website failure. In fact, this bizarre shopping discount day, transplanted from America without its cultural context (like trying to import Alaska’s snow) illustrated only one thing: the love affair with shopping is over.

Outside John Lewis on Oxford Street was an overnight queue of one man. Journalists noted ruefully that the only people waiting anywhere were other journalists. Some blamed the retailers for the undramatic discounts, and others claimed cheerfully that the shopping was still taking place, just online. But it’s the beginning of the end. If you don’t want anything enough to get off your sofa for it, there’s a strong chance that you’re finally sated. What do you get the species that has everything? Manufacturers can stave off the inevitable by building in obsolescence and selling everything as a positional good – a thing you need to prove to others that you’re 1% better than they are. But one day, the answer to that question will be: nothing.

‘You can bake cupcakes with her face on, while dressed as her, singing into an icicle shaped microphone, already pre-loaded with one, inevitable song.’ Photograph: Allstar/Disney/Sportsphoto

When Selfridges opened its Christmas shop, in the preposterous month of August, its buyer told me there were two main trends: in decoration, monochrome; and in presents, personalisation. Of course, she was a right – just because the job of “Christmas trend spotter” brings into sudden focus the perilous anomie facing the entire civilisation doesn’t mean there’s no skill to it. Monochrone is rather an end-of-days statement, the arrival of world in which we’ve had just too many Skittles, too much luxury, too many Benetton ads with the gloves and the knitwear, too many iPods and rainbows; we’ve just had it with colour. We’re post colour.

Personalisation is more telling still, and it’s everywhere. You personalise your kids’ stocking and all the wrapping paper. You get their name painted on baubles and buy a teddy that will sync with your phone, so that you can teach it what your child likes and doesn’t like, to become an “instant best bear buddy” (no really, I’m serious). Where once the act of the purchase was its own distinction – I’ve bought something, therefore I exist and I have power – now you have to have bought something that only you could buy. The problem with having consumerism as the building block of your identity is that you might end up, through a series of perfectly well-informed and self-interested choices, with the same identity as somebody else. Unless you buy this bear, which will know that you love nectarines but that peaches turn your stomach.

Future-proofers have been saying for some time that the age of the thing is over, to be replaced by the age of the experience. This opened up a market for hot air ballooning and go-karting. As it turned out, that isn’t the kind of experience anybody had in mind. And so Groupon was born, to sell at a discount things nobody wanted in the first place. Families all out of ideas, barely knowing each other, exchange adult stunt driving experiences and Strictly Come Dancing live studio tours, a shadow market whose thrill is in passing things off that look more expensive than they actually were. There is so much cross-current on a typical Groupon page – human intimacy and the lack of it, gift economy and its deceits, the search for purpose in all the wrong places – I often consider writing it as an epic poem, but get distracted by the offers. Then – wham! – before I know it, I’m on an intensive horse riding course in Trent Park.

Children, though. That wellspring of desire looked as though it would go on forever. If you can’t trust a six-year-old passionately to want a machine that fashions synthetic sand into the shape of an ice cream, who on earth can you trust to want anything? But kids have lost their mojo too. I’m about to extrapolate wildly from a very small sample, but try it yourself. Ask a kid, any kid, what they want for Christmas. They’ve all already got a tablet, and nothing else is as good. Most probably, they will ask you for something that’s alive. You don’t get much more personalised than a puppy: it’s almost as if they do know you.

The industry, impotent in the face of indifference, resorts to dredging up new ways to imitate Elsa from Frozen, the most over-leveraged film in merchandise history. You can bake cupcakes with her face on, while dressed as her, singing into an icicle-shaped microphone already pre-loaded with one, inevitable song. Just let it go, consumerism. You’ve lost the will to live.