I know if we weren't consumers and were producers like our ancestors, we'd be more stable and fulfilled as individuals.

This is such bullshit. Historical reality is a far cry from "Dances with Wolves" or whatever movie you dredged this fiction from. Life was hard, brutal, and short. People carried the trauma of day-to-day encounters with death from the cradle to their grave. In northern countries, many suffered from scurvy due to being unable to find anything fresh during their brutal winters. Nobody forced market economics on the people of the West, people embraced it, willingly. There was no need for the violent revolutions that preceded so many socialist and communist experiments, as free markets made people's lives so much better almost immediately. It was a development that made life easier for a broad swath of the world. The ability to trade a temporary harvest for the treasures of the world cannot be overstated in its importance.

I agree with you, completely, that consumerism robs the modern man of meaning and sanity. I would point out , though, that this has existed to an extent for thousands of year (yes unfortunately even traditional societies were obsessed with flexing riches and tying self-worth to possessions), but I would think everyone would agree it' gotten much worse, especially post WW2. I don't think market economics are to blame so much as corporations and governments jointly realizing how profitable it is build populations defined by their consumption of goods. There's an economic incentive, certainly to pursue this strategy, but it feels equally political. I would blame the destruction of religion and traditional societal organization instead. Modern man is no longer a Christian/Muslim/whatever, a patriot (post WW2/911/Vietnam that's problematic), a soldier (used to be most men would serve in some form, now less than 2%), member of a trade or business (jobs are temporary, the company man is dead), fraternal order (shriners, masons, Boy Scouts, knights of Columbus all in decline), ideology (mostly blended together and neutered, only now are we seeing the rise of extreme movements that dominate personal identity). At last the modern man is only defined by whether he's red or blue, and his $80,000 funkopop collection. I wouldn't call this a necessary product of capitalism so much as a shrewd political strategy to cultivate a new peasant class, played to perfection and at last reaching fruition. (edit for grammar)