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Forget regular exercise. And while you're at it, forget about your regime of anti-aging creams, brain teasers and cosmetic fillers. According to social critic Benjamin R. Barber, author of Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults and Swallow Citizens Whole, it's shopping that will turn back the clock.

His central thesis (around which he makes several far-reaching points regarding the nature of contemporary capitalism and the future of democracy - issues that, happily, are largely outside our concern here in the Style pages) is that it is in the interest of consumer culture to keep us forever young.

Barber, who spoke about his book to a packed auditorium at the University of Toronto last month, argues that the "problem" with grownups is that, "unlike children, they don't say, 'I want, I want, gimme.' They need less and they have adult judgment." There is no better way to fix this, he suggests, than for marketers to create and foster a culture that denigrates maturity and supports everything youthful, "dumbing down adults and purveying children's tastes."

Barber boils down this effect to three guiding principles in the culture: Easy over Hard, Simple over Complex, and Fast over Slow.

Easy, he says, is "all gain, no pain": weight loss without exercise, marriage without commitment, Internet "college degrees" without or learning, athletic success through steroids, as well as "products deprived of their malignant property" - i.e. "coffee without caffeine, cream without fat and beer without alcohol."

On this point, Barber could simply publish a book-long list and it would be right on the money. It is easier to be dressed as casually as a toddler, pay no heed to the rules of grammar and behave generally as if nobody else on Earth mattered (in short, like a child). Easy is refusing to take adult responsibility for disciplining your children. Or lying on your résumé to hawk a "memoir" on Oprah and inventing your sources on a cocktail napkin rather than going out to do any reporting. It is also easy to read other people's stupid opinions on their blogs instead of having to read the newspaper and formulate your own, and it's even easier to watch stupid television from a sofa than to read anything at all.

Speaking of stupid, the reason that the Harry Potter books were such smash bestsellers, and that among the top-five grossing films of 2004 were Shrek 2, Spider-Man, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and The Incredibles, Barber writes, is that "more 50-year olds went to see Shrek than anything challenging or complex."

Indeed, the preference for Simple over Complex can be seen everywhere, from the taste for celebrity gossip and infotainment instead of hard news, violence without consequence and pictures over words, to a preference for the childishly bland and sweet over anything challenging (witness the rise of such juvenilia as coffee drinks disguised as milkshakes, "designer" cupcakes, "collectible" sneakers and "cult-label" jeans).

The mass desire for Fast over Slow, on the other hand, is about mastery over that annoying little detail of human existence: time itself. Our childish desire for instant gratification, Barber argues, has wrought a consumer culture smitten with "fast food, fast music, fast film-editing ... the fast-track life." Thanks to instant messaging and the immediacy of communication, there is no time for the ripening of an idea or any deliberation. What's more, there is just no way to keep up with the constant streams of information and new media phenomena other than by madly flipping through everything at what amounts to warp speed.

We are, in effect, being forced to have the approximate attention span of a three-year-old. "This is not just attention deficit disorder but compulsory attention deficit disorder," Barber writes, "defined by a culture in which we are dissuaded from concentration and continuity and rewarded for pursuing jump-cut lives."

He adds: "One job, one spouse, one career, one home, one personality over a whole lifetime seem so monotonous and, well, from the kids' perspective, so bor-ing. New friends, new families, new lovers, new homes, new fashions mean new commodities, new credit cards, new shopping sprees, new products and, hence, new purchases."

Even if - incredibly - none of this sounds like anyone you know, you must admit that the man is onto something. We are being dumbed down and encouraged to act and feel less like adults and more like children (and to conceal loathingly the expired best-before-date aspects of ourselves we cannot get to conform). All of which leaves us with two options: to literally shop until we drop, or to acknowledge this reality, and then seize back some measure of the adult dignity we are so busily trying to consume our way out of, and reclaim it as our own.