If you pay close attention to consumer advertising, it is easy to detect a theme: purchasing is the road to happiness. By this reasoning, it would be easy to conclude that a simpler, less object-heavy lifestyle is the correct path to misery.
This would be an error.
In fact, the key to misery is to avoid accidentally treading the path to fulfillment, and one of the best ways to accomplish this is to occupy one’s time (and wallet) with the pursuit of objects. In this quest, your human mind will happily collude. Simply pay attention to the wonders paraded before you by the advertising industry and displayed beautifully in the shops that line your town’s streets and malls. Your heart will learn to leap like a dog offered cheese. That sweater! That riding mower! That designer perfume! That barbecue with the six-foot rotisserie! You’ll want it all.
The result of our society’s consumer gluttony? If you thought, a decade ago, that investing in the personal storage industry would be a good bet, you were right. Storage units, once the curious domain of wealthy hoarders, have become mainstream. Having filled their homes with things they do not need, people in Western societies have increasingly turned to outside suppliers of square footage where they can put all of their unused treasures. There is over 2.3 billion square feet of self-storage area in the United States alone, equivalent to more than three times the total area of Manhattan.
Why do we buy so much? The act of obtaining possessions usually reveals a person’s implicit map to happiness:
And, sure enough, most people can point to specific objects they own that give them pleasure—as well as many that do not. In my case, $600 impulsively spent on a couch for my home office, where I imagined I would lie on summer afternoons reading Proust, was essentially flushed away, but the $20 paid for used truck tubes on which to float down a nearby river was eminently well spent.
The problem is not so much the purchasing itself, but the predictions we make. It is unlikely that most of the objects finding their way into storage units are the source of great personal pleasure. And humans are poorly wired to guess correctly.
As discussed earlier, in Stumbling on Happiness, psychologist Daniel Gilbert points out that (apart from purchasers of the book you’re reading) humans generally base decisions about their behavior on the likelihood that their actions will bring pleasure in the future. Unfortunately, we are startlingly poor at making these predictions. Most Mercedes sedans are purchased not for the glories of German engineering, but for the mood that the buyer imagines will ensue—and its longevity. “It costs $80,000, but it will make me truly happy, and I’ll probably have the car for eight years—so about $10,000 a year for a happy life, which seems reasonable.”
The lovely thing about predictions like this is that they are completely testable. “How happy do you think it will make you? Okay, now go on and buy it, and let’s see what happens.” In many of these studies, it turns out that people become about as happy as they imagined. In other words, they guessed correctly. But the elevated mood lasts only a short time—sometimes a week, sometimes much less, depending on the purchase. Suddenly, $80,000 for a week’s pride of ownership doesn’t seem like such a bargain.
Swiss-British author Alain de Botton, in Status Anxiety, writes, “The best way to stop appreciating something is to buy it.” (After I relayed this observation at a recent workshop, one of the female participants was heard to mutter, “or marry it.”) De Botton seems to be right. A painting appreciated and admired out there in the world can be an object of pleasure and longing forever, but purchased and hung in one’s front hall, it quickly becomes an ignored dust-collector.
The key point, for our purposes, is that the futile quest for emotional fulfillment via the purchase of objects is an excellent strategy for the longer-term cultivation of misery. What could be better than a constantly renewable pursuit that ends, again and again, in disappointment? Consumerism is even better than that might imply, however, because it also involves the outflow of money and resources. We strive to obtain the trappings of wealth and end up poorer than when we started. Perfect!