Each day we are flooded with cultural messages and images from TV, the internet, advertisements, our friends and families that the pursuit of possessions, status, wealth, beauty, health, and credentials are the path to a meaningful life. A recent TV ad makes the point as it shows a variety of seemingly successful people trying to explain their purchase of a luxurious but useless item. The ad diminishes these purchases and justifies spending considerable income on a luxury car! I guess the writes of the ad didn’t see the irony of their message.
The late comedian, George Carlin, once described the satisfaction one gets from acquiring lots of stuff as equivalent to being hungry and taping sandwiches to different parts of your body. So, if the acquiring of material possessions does not make us genuinely happier why do we strive so hard…and feel so worthless when we can’t acquire possessions.
There is the all too human tendency to feel inferior when we feel we do not belong. If the cultural messages tell us that everyone is striving to acquire some possession or experience we feel left out if we are also not striving in the same direction as the rest of the herd. This feeling of being left out can be considered a feeling of inferiority. If we feel inferior we will naturally want to move in the opposite direction-superiority. In this case, striving for superiority through acquiring some object of desire (what others have said is desirable) enhances our feelings of belonging.
What we soon discover is that we are stuck on what has been called the “hedonic treadmill.” The more we acquire the still more we have to strive for in order to maintain our fictional sense of superiority. By avoiding the natural feelings of inferiority and choosing a fictional striving to minimize our recognition of limitations we enhance of lack of self-knowledge, our feeling of belonging, and disconnect from our own sense of what is important for other people’s views. We begin to live our life in fear of feeling inferior and not belonging to the larger human community. Our materialistic strivings diminish our sense of well-being and misdirects our creative power.
How do we get off this hedonic treadmill? One solution is implied in the commercial I mention previously. Although their conclusion may be mistaken, in that the substituted one material possession for another, the writes did initially encourage us viewers to consider why we were making such purchases to begin with. It is not that we need to give up all material strivings we do need to have our purchases serve our valuing. Perhaps we need to spend more time wondering what it is we value and how we can move in that direction and leave those cultural messages behind unless they are in sync with our valuing.