Your post reminds me of this quote about how a teacher's assumptions affect identity:
"When those who have the power to name and to socially construct reality choose not to see you or hear you ... when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked in the mirror and saw nothing." —Adrienne Rich, 1984
"The time [sic] of consumerism I advise against is the kind of consumerism that seems to make people unhappy according to the specific research papers I cited."
When writing an essay about achieving happiness, it's not very helpful to define a term as inherently causing happiness or unhappiness, even if you can point to the literature for clarification. You end up with the tautology that "doing X -- which is defined as causing happiness -- makes you happy" or the inverse.
The rest of the essay is a rather nice survey of achieving happiness; I'll be sure to point some friends at it.