4:51 pm

If you ask the average American what the single most important factor for happiness and quality of living is, most of them would probably answer: More money.

The more green the better. The more money the happier we are.

I don't know if you buy into statistics, experiments, and reports on human conditions and experiences, but they seem to be pointing the opposite direction (perhaps personal experiences can affirm). The fact that more money and more stuff isn't making us happier, but it's actually making us more miserable. The United States is the world's richest, most wasteful, and most affluent nation yet it contains some of the world's most miserable people.

This is a stark contrast to our grandparents a couple of generations ago; we are richer, living bigger, faster and more materially abundant. The average American now owns twice as many cars, significantly larger homes, and more material goods; gross domestic product per capita has tripled since 1950. Communication is faster and easier with cellular phones and the internet; all the while our TVs become bigger, flatter, and more clear. Food is everywhere, meat is cheaper, people are fatter while we are making and using up more plastic, paper, and petroleum than any other time period and anywhere else in the world. America has enough food to feed the entire planet, and each of us uses up more energy in a day than somebody else from a developing country uses up in a year.

But holistically, we seem to be more depressed than ever despite the increase of economic and material growth since the last generation.

I'm not a big fan of using stats and numbers to quantify the quality of human experiences, but for the sake of this argument, I'm going to throw out some numbers:

In 1940s, America was the forth happiest among advanced economies. 10 years later, it dropped to eighth. In 1950 the numbers of Americans who said they were "very happy with their lives on average" peaked in the 50s, and ever since then the proportion of happy Americans dropped to just a quarter. From the year 1991 to 2004, the economy expanded rapidly under the Clinton boom, but the numbers of "negative life experiences" increased, as more and more people are slitting their wrists, visiting the shrinks, and divorcing.

You see, our grandparents had less space to fill up with their junk. They lived in small houses/barns, but instead of more "stuff", it was more people. The square footage per household has increased significantly from previous generations, but the people per household has decreased. So people talked and ate together more, they played together outside and socialized more.

We live in isolation in both our homes and in our communities. How can we not? The way our whole infrastructure is designed is geared towards having your own private "American Dream" space.

The suburban sprawl is the by-product of our irrational drive for isolation. Because we all want to stay as far away from our neighbors as possible, everyone and everything is designed to be so far away from each other that not only are people lacking interactions, they are completely dependent on cars to get to places, as they are walking less, getting fatter, and leaving more carbon footprints along the way.

Even the interior designs of new houses are geared towards dysfunctional families who prefer to stay to themselves for private entertainment. Our living rooms are smaller, while bathroom rooms and bedrooms are bigger.

This whole notion of "more space for crap, but less people for interaction” is going against our natural instincts. Human beings are hardwired to be social animals; living in big groups is what got us here through the millions of years of evolution/struggle for survival. No wonder we are not really "living" anymore by surrounding ourselves with IKEA-mongering activities and material goods.

But we have another instinctual drive that helped our ancestors survive in the past, but is working against us in modernity: The innate drive to acquire or the Will to consume.

We are designed by nature, along with all any other organisms, to be consumers. We are born with the need to acquire and to acquire more. It is part of how evolution produces any reproducing organism: to be a consuming animal, to have endless needs and wants.

Having this drive to acquire our needs was a way our genes use our bodies and minds/brains as vessels to carry and pass on our genes to the next generations since it guarantees that we eat and reproduce. Our ancestors used this innate desire to hunt and gather food, build tools and shelters to satisfy our basic needs. But that's really all we need; everything else above our basic needs of food and shelters are wants.

With the invention of agriculture that produced surpluses, the majority of the people didn't have to worry about hunting or other means of acquiring food or building our own shelters. The means to consume our basic needs are satisfied for the most of us who live in industrialized world. This is leaving a big hunk of space in our innate will to consume. So we find other means to satisfy this biological need to acquire:

We "hunted" big checks and status by working corporate jobs. We "gathered" status symbols by buying useless crap at shopping malls and electronic stores until we are all trapped in the great Cycle of Pursuit.

How much is enough? How much do we really want to be happy?

If happiness is relative, then we need an anchor to measure how happy we are. And this anchor is usually other people's level of happiness. It's too bad that our culture has made us believe (yes this is one of those things that I blame culture for instead of genetics) that happiness means having more materials and money.

The amount of status symbols and wealth has become our one of the anchors we use to measuring our own happiness level against other people's. - How much stuff other people have in comparison to your own collection of stuff determines how happy you are. If I bought a ferrari, I would feel pretty important only up until everybody else in my neighborhood starts driving ferraris too. When my ferrari loses its status, I would need an upgrade and purchase a private jet in order to regain my dominance.

Most reproducing organisms have status symbols to stand out from the crowd from other animals in the same community in order to attract the opposite sex.

Peacock's tails, bird songs and dances, lion's mane, are all examples of perceived visible, external denotation and declarations of one's social position, fitness level and sexual attractiveness. But for the most part, the status symbols of other animals are built-in and limited. A peacock's tale can only have so many colors, a bird can only sing and dance so much before their body becomes exhausted.

Wealth is the ultimate status symbol for human beings. But what good is money if it's all inside your bank account, unseen?

Conspicuous consumption is wasteful consumption of of useless things. The more wasteful you are, and the more useless the things you buy are, the more "status" you have and the more "fit" you you are. This is where we tell our friends and neighbors : Look, I have so much money that I can afford stuff that are useless to my survival. (Hummers, jewelries, gold, and so on).

With money however, human beings discover means to acquire endless amounts of status symbols. And what good is a status symbol that is outdated, outnumbered, and outsized?

The more we want to impress everyone else, the more things we need to acquire. The more things YOU require, the more things THEY need to acquire in order to have more than you do; this in turn motivates you to buy more stuff to be happier, and so on.

We are always stretching out our necks in order to inspect what other people are having, or what the latest goods in the markets are in order to consume the newest stuff on the shelf before anybody beats you to it.

Marketers and advertisement agencies are way ahead of psychologists and evolutionary biologists in figuring out how human nature works. They spend a huge amount of effort and money inventing new stuff for you to buy and dreaming up new strategies to make the mindless masses think that they need these things to have a happier and more fulfilling life. They are always asking: How do you get people to buy shit they don't need? How do you convince people to think that what they want is not a want at all, but necessity?

The desire to consume, acquire, and produce is insatiable. This insatiability is the most desirable weapon in nature. Humans, like all other reproducing species are designed to never stop needing and to never feel satisfied in relation and relative to what's given in an environment. Without this insatiable desire for needs, organisms cannot and will not reproduce. Nature will not progress. And the universe we know would not exist.

We want what we don't have, and as soon as we get what we wanted, we want more of it. We live for the future but never for the present moment. We are always projecting ourselves into the future, directing our consciousness at the things we don't have but want to consume, eat up, deplete, and waste in the future.

So here we are as obsessed consuming creatures, accumulating goods. The more stuff more we buy, the longer hours we need to work to afford everything we bought. The more we work, the more money we have to consume even more stuff.

All that hours spent working is making us pissed off, tired, and stressed out. So what do we do? We reward ourselves and pat ourselves on the backs by spending all that hard-earned money for a vacation or more goods to cope with our stress, which leads to more debts to be paid, longer work hours and so on.

The more things we have, the more we need to consume (accessories and what not) in order to maintain, protect, and upgrade what we already have. Not to mention all these other things we need to buy in order to sustain what we already have. If you buy a car, you're going need rims, tinted windows, maintenance work, and insurance to go along with it. If you purchase a house, you are going to need a $15,000 painting and a marble statue, a security system, and lots of fancy furniture.

With a great abundance of stuff comes with great responsibility and anxiety. Let's not forget all the distress and worries and fear that come with owning so much things, since I have to constantly worry about other people stealing my shit, keying my car, breaking into my mansion and so on.

This spirals into what is happening today with the economy...

Which is in shambles. We can get into technicalities, but the core root of the problem stems from greed and foolishness. Broken down, greed from the part of investment bankers and mortgage lenders, and foolishness from the ignorant masses trying to purchase homes that were way beyond their means.