Y'all (as they say here) should go read Marx. What you're talking about is called disenchantment through commodification. Which is easily summed up and explained in the phrase: when everything has a price nothing has value.
And in a market society, in which every form of social exchange is actually an opportunity for buying and selling, everything eventually acquires a price. And in so doing it becomes an opportunity for profit. And profit is, of course, the motor of Capitalism which has as its principal motivation the investment and re-investment of first capital and then profit in every process which yields profit.
Santa Claus, Mickey Mouse, Mom's Apple Pie, Highschool Sweethearts, the heroic, the cowardly, the banal, the erotic - all of them necessarily become marketing opportunities and all of them, once succesfully marketed, become commodities like any other; one more thing to be bought and sold.
It's our inevitable disappointment, when confronted by a commodity instead of a myth, that's referred to as disenchantment.
Marx thought he'd found a way to re-enchant the world through Communism and the appearance of Communist Man. We all know what happened to that particular fantasy. But while his solution to the problem of Capitalism's soullessness is untenable nonsense, his diagnosis of the problem has never been bettered.
Marx was a flawed thinker in many ways - his theory of the emergence of Communist Man is nothing but Christianity's New Adam come to save us - this time dressed in coveralls and carrying a gun. But he understands better than any other, before or since, the seductive and genuine freedoms bestowed by Capitalism that lead inevitably to one more form of servitude. Everyone knows what a wage-slave is. It doesn't even have to be explained.
From inside a culture, inside a moment in time, the solution to the problems a culture faces, with which history presents it, can't be determined. I sincerely doubt, however, that I will outlive Capitalsm. Right now, and for a very long time to come, it's the only game in town. But I can hope that it eventually burns itself out.
A way of life that reduces a man to his capacity for labor, and then rewards that labor according to the whims and eccenticities of the market place, is undignified and unfit.
