To hell with Don Draper: Greg Foyster is a real-­life ad man gone rogue.

After five of years writing ad copy to sell everything from toasters to condiments, he just couldn’t take it anymore. So he started writing a magazine column about environmental issues, one of his passions, as a side ­gig. He spent his 9­-to-5s coming up with pitch-­perfect tag lines for big brand products, and his weekends writing about the devastating toll over­consumption was taking on our world.

One evening at an advertising awards ceremony, Foyster broke down in tears. The cognitive dissonance between his two jobs was killing him.

“Disproportionate resource use is linked to climate change,” he told the Guardian. “The director of the Princeton Environmental Institute has calculated that the richest 500 million people in the world emit half the world’s fossil fuel carbon [...] People who consume the most place the greatest demand on natural resources, and therefore cause the greatest destruction.

It’s advertising that helps to create desires to drive this overconsumption.”

With this knowledge and the crisis of conscience he experienced because of it, Foyster made the decision to quit advertising. He didn’t just change jobs, either. Instead, he began a cycling trip up the east coast of Australia to explore the­ the idea of simple living. He eventually wrote a book about his journey.

Foyster left because he was fed up: disheartened by the process of pushing products, horrified by the ecological toll of constant consumption, and longing for a way to get out of the job he hated to support a lifestyle he wasn’t sure he even wanted. Sound familiar?

It should. We all live amid similar contradictions. We tend to think buying begets contentment. We believe that a new lipstick or a new coat or a new car will make us happier. Better. And, as Foyster explains, this is no accident.

“This is now advertising’s role in the economy – to convince people that non­material happiness can be gained through material belongings,” he told the Guardian.

Desires for material things have limits – most people really only want or need one dishwasher, or one or two cars – but desire for emotional needs like status, love, acceptance and autonomy are bottomless. Tying material goods to nonmaterial desires ensures people are never satisfied with what they have. It’s how we’ve convinced some of the most materially rich citizens in history that they don’t have enough.

The promise of happiness, connection and privilege convinces us to open our wallets again and again. This message is so effective that we remain perversely determined to consume, even when study after study shows that it leaves us saddled with debt, drowning in our possessions and stressed beyond belief. And, perhaps more troubling, we over­consume because we live in a society that relies upon it.

In an interview, Foyster quoted prominent retail analyst Victor Lebow, who in 1955 wrote in the Journal of Retailing:

Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption ... We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing pace.

This message sums up the advertising world of the last half­-century. It’s insidious, pervasive, and deliberate – and it’s consuming us.

Our current buying behaviour has very little to do with what we need and everything to do with how having something will make us feel. Advertising points out a problem you never knew you had, makes you feel bad for having it, and then sells you a solution. The end result of this twisted process is lower quality of life, more time spent working, and horrific environmental damage due to over­consumption.

Foyster explains: “The root cause of ecological destruction from resource use isn’t overpopulation, but over­consumption. Over­consumption isn’t some vague term I made up – it refers to a level of consumption beyond what the Earth can sustainably replenish. For example, if everyone on the planet wanted to live the lifestyle of the average Australian, we would need 3.7 Earths to supply resources.”

So where does it end? Where do we stop? How do we stop? Especially those of us unwilling or unable to quit our jobs and bike around Australia’s gold coast?

For Foyster, the first step is acknowledging that we’re all in this together. He says: “We all live in this consumer capitalist world, we all over­consume, it’s totally normal and we shouldn’t feel guilty about it. We should just acknowledge that sometimes buying a lot of stuff is a distraction from the things we really want in life, the things that really make us happy.”

How does one do that? I chose to cancel cable, thus reducing the sheer volume of ads I was exposed to every day. I chose to evaluate needs versus wants, and shop secondhand. I chose to turn consuming from a habit to a choice.

Likewise for Foyster, the answer lies in mindfulness. “For me, the answer is to ask myself a very commonsense question: do I want to buy something because it will be useful in my life? Or because it will help me feel like a smarter, better, more popular or successful person? If the answer is the second reason then there’s a good chance I’ve been duped by the marketing.”

He adds: “The antidote to wanting more, more, more is to take great pleasure in the wonderful life you already have.”