Existential & Phenomenological Discomfort

• Jean-Paul Sartre – Nausea: You may already know of it, but this is the core text. A man becomes overwhelmed by the sheer contingency and absurdity of objects around him—tables, tree roots, even his own hand. It’s a slow burn but directly evokes the feeling you describe.
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty – Phenomenology of Perception (Selected Passages): Dense, but fascinating if you’re interested in the bodily and perceptual aspects of experience. His insights on how we inhabit space could help explain your disorientation in commercial environments.

Consumer Culture & Alienation

• David Foster Wallace – “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”: The essay isn't about supermarkets, but about a cruise—also a synthetic, ultra-curated environment. He dissects how hyper-designed spaces, meant to maximize pleasure, instead create existential despair. Funny, biting, and disturbing.
• Mark Fisher – Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?: A short, incisive book. Fisher explores how modern consumer-capitalism dulls our ability to imagine alternatives, and how that leads to a kind of depressive malaise in everyday life—including schools, offices, and, yes, supermarkets.
• Georges Perec – Things: A Story of the Sixties: A novella about a young couple obsessed with objects and consumer goods. It slowly reveals the spiritual emptiness beneath material excess. Unsettling in a quiet way.

Fiction that Captures the Feeling

• Don DeLillo – White Noise: A must-read for your interest. It nails the sublime absurdity of American life, particularly in its supermarket scenes: “Everything seemed to be in season, sprayed, burnished, bright. It was hard to believe this stuff was meant to be eaten.”
• J.G. Ballard – Kingdom Come: A dystopian novel about a shopping mall that becomes a totalitarian state. Satirical, eerie, and disturbingly plausible.

Optional Poetic / Philosophical Enhancers

• Walter Benjamin – “The Arcades Project” (excerpts): Haunting reflections on 19th-century consumer culture that feel eerily relevant now.
• Roland Barthes – Mythologies: A semiotic unpacking of everyday things—including packaging and mass media—that reads like philosophy disguised as pop critique.