Buying Happiness: An Ecolinguistic Analysis of Consumerist Ideologies in Modern Lifestyle Advertising

This study examines how consumerist ideologies are linguistically and visually determined in modern lifestyle advertising, applying the model of Ecolinguistics suggested by Arran Stibbe (The Stories We Live By). The story of where human well-being is associated with unlimited material consumption is a major ecological danger as the global climate crisis continues to worsen. This study aims to un-story the advertisements in the contemporary society in order to uncover how these advertisements justify un-sustainable practices. The study employs a qualitative research design to examine a purposive sample of ten (10) representative advertisements of the key industry sectors such as fashion, technology, and travel industry. This analysis uses the major analytical tools of Stibbe; Ideology (mental models), Appraisal (evaluative language), Erasure (hidden ecological costs), and Salience (visual focus). The results show that such adverts always advance a destructive narrative in which happiness, social bonding, and even environmental protection are presented as consequences of consumption. Critical pattern of Erasure was observed, according to which the impacts the production and disposal of the product have on the environment is systematically concealed behind the purr words and images of nature. The paper concludes with the idea that lifestyle advertising is a potent pedagogical influence that alienates the consumer to the ecological reality and thus the provision of novel narratives based on well-being as opposed to accumulation is of urgent necessity.