consideration of how people survived prior to being engaged in their current occupations

First, often very badly. Stark poverty including hunger (and I'd like to bet that very few of us have actually ever been hungry) was widespread before the 1940s.
Second, there were a lot less of us- the UK population has doubled in the last hundred years or so, the US and China trebled.
Third, even when not actually in poverty, people's expectations were much lower. In particular, without domestic appliances, women were normally slaves to housework.

As for what I mean by 'consumption' I think it's fairly close to what the video (the bit of it I got to see) means by 'stuff'. You don't need a 4GHz, 2GB RAM computer to do word processing- a 1990s 386 would be perfectly adequate. Most of the power of modern machines is "forced" on us by software bloat and addiction to eye-candy. It's interesting that even Linux suffers from bloat- it used to run happily on a 386 with 16MB of RAM, now mainstream distributions need very nearly the same as Redmond productions.

But to keep ticking, industry needs to sell every one of us a new computer, a new car, a new Walkman/MP3 player or equivalent every couple of years, TV screens are now so big that if you aren't interested in the individual pixels you need to watch from across the street, etc. etc. And even when people aren't actually prodcing all this, they are selling it, transporting it, stacking it.

So putting on a hair shirt will risk causing mass disruption in the short term- and in the long term we're all dead. It's the tone of individualism about the "stuff" movie that is wrong- headed. It's absolutely true that the planet can't sustain an exponentially expanding population with exponentially increasing expectations. But it's also true that if we want to avoid the total dislocation of society, the change to a sustainable model has to be a planned, mass- based, international movement. Weaselly tricks to make yourself look good by dumping the blame for your damage on others (aka "carbon trading" and similar scams) will only hinder the development of the base of understanding needed.