Bateman doesn't want the business card because it signals status.

He wants it because it proves he exists in a way that can be seen — and when he learns McDermott's card is embossed while his is raised lettering, he doesn't feel envy first, he feels unmade.

Because if the card is the thing that proves you in the room, and someone else's card is marginally more convincing, then you are not the thing in the room—the card is, and you are whatever is left over. Ellis understood something the materialism readings missed: the horror isn't buying expensive things, it's that expensive things are the only language available to say 'I am.'

Bateman can't point to a genuinely felt preference, a real conviction, or an unrepeatable choice — he can only point to things that exist on a spectrum where someone else's version might be incrementally better. This is the trap: not that he wants things, but that he is structurally prevented from wanting anything that can't be immediately substituted. The book's real prediction isn't that we'd become Bateman — it's that we'd inherit his system without his money, so the logic of infinite substitutability would colonize every professional identity without the resources to ever feel settled in one.

The anxiety Bateman performs isn't an excess of capitalism; it's the baseline wage for admission to any world where you must continuously prove you belong through objects and aesthetics that are, by definition, never finished proving anything.