Materialism is making us miserable.
Materialism is making us miserable.
It's a trap!
Materialism, or consumerism, is designed to make you unhappy: “Your life is shit right now, because you don’t have the new iPhone! Imagine how much better your life would be if you had the new iPhone!”
That’s how advertising works. It creates the illusion that your life is not complete, not perfect, not your best life, unless you buy the latest gizmo.
Then you struggle to come up with the money to buy the gizmo. And when you finally buy it, you have a brief moment of joy, before the next ad tells you to buy the next gizmo, because your life is shit.
This cycle continues until you drop dead. As long as you seek happiness in material goods, you will never be happy. Happiness will always be just out of reach. There’s always one more gizmo you need to buy, for a moment of fleeting happiness that quickly disappears.
Buying more and more stuff isn’t gonna make you happier:
America, desperate for happiness, is getting less and less happy.
Is consumerism robbing us of our humanism and happiness?
The desire to acquire: Why the novelty of buying new things soon wears off
When the novelty wears off: When shiny object syndrome negatively affects our daily lives.
Why over-consumption is making us unhappy
Here's proof buying more stuff actually makes you miserable
The psychology of materialism, and why it's making you unhappy
A psychologist explains why materialism is making you unhappy
The path to real, lasting happiness is to realize that happiness is not external. It’s not something you can buy.
You can never have everything. You can either be miserable about that your entire life, and chase the next gizmo, and the next, and the next, or you can accept that what makes people truly happy is not the next gizmo.
Happiness is knowing that you don’t really need the next gizmo to be happy.
Happiness is be content.
Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world. Why is he still trying to make more and more and more money? Because no amount is ever enough.
You are so right! I actually think that the ‘pursuit of happiness’ is a bit of a mistake because, ironically, searching for it is actually far more likely to make you unhappy and discontent. True happiness is really rather rare, fleeting and elusive and isn't something pursuable or permanently attainable. Contentment is a much more realistic and healthier goal and can be learned, but I do appreciate that the ‘pursuit of contentment’ doesn't have the same ring to it and sounds rather clumsy. Both contentment and happiness are much more a state of mind than something attained by external things, least of all from material possessions. It might sound a bit trite, but count your blessings. Instead of focusing on the things you lack – there'll always be that one last, “if only…” thing you don't have – focus on what you do have. I may be relatively poor financially but I don't go hungry, I don't freeze in winter and I'm not being bombed. More than anything else, I have amazing, wonderful, beautiful friends and I have music, art and literature (despite having had my entire record and CD collection stolen, I've got all but one or two records back through my streaming service, not to mention a wealth of new music). Those are my most treasured ‘possessions’. There's the beauty of nature to appreciate (I live in London, a mile from ‘the city’, London's financial district and I'm more fortunate than many in that there's a green outside my front door and a small park opposite, so lots of trees, but there are several much bigger parks within a mile or two – London Fields is the closest, a 10' walk away which has a great pub (Pub on the Park. ‘Pub’ is short for ‘public house’, what we Brits call bars), a large children's playground, a paddling pool, a lido, basketball & tennis courts, a cricket pitch and public table-tennis tables (being your own paddles & ping-pong balls). Haggerston Park & Hackney City Farm, Victoria Park, Springfield Park, Rosemary Gardens, Shoreditch Park, Clissold Park, Hackney & Walthamstow Marshes (the latter a nature reserve) & Finsbury Park are all within a 10'-15' bike ride, so even if you don't have the luck to live opposite one, everyone's within a 15' walk. And last, but by no means least, we have access to the sum of human knowledge through Wikipedia. If only we took the time to reflect, our lives are so incredibly rich. The secret to happiness is to be content: “Be Happy With What You Have to Be Happy With”, to quote the title of a King Crimson song. By learning to be content you're much more open to and likely to come across those fleeting moments of true happiness and pure joy, so I wish you all contentment 😊.
Hi Oliver, great article here, keep it up. We all need to acknowledge the fact that this lifestyle isn't working and our planet is suffering from it. God bless