Picture this. It's Sunday, and you are in your home, sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea, looking out the window at the sunset. The sky melts from orange to deep red. It has been a pleasant weekend. You met up with a friend to go to the gelato shop that both of you have been excited to see for the longest time. You finished all of the housework. You paid your neighbor's kid to wash your car, and now that's clean too. Well, clean enough--what do you expect from a nine-year-old, really? You bring the cup of tea to your lips. The sky is a deep indigo now. You feel the steam envelop your nostrils, and you put the cup down as a strange, sinking feeling hits you in the chest. It's a creeping, nagging feeling that seems to come back at dusk, oftentimes on Sundays. What am I doing with my life? What am I trying to achieve, really? You glance around at your apartment. What is this? The sinking feeling spreads to your stomach and you take another gulp, but the tea just doesn't cure it.
Discontentment. Confusion. Shame. By any of the typical ways to measure happiness, you should have happiness. You have a well-paying job, a humble home, and most of the things you've ever wanted. Everything seems to be in place. And yet... With a sigh, you dump the rest of the tea into the sink and close the curtains.Emptiness remains.
I think we all have this experience. At some point, we acquire the things that we've always wanted, and we expect these things to make us happy. Yet, after finally collecting it all, we're left feeling exhausted and famished rather than content.
There's clearly a problem here. Are we so silly that we expect material items to make us happy? The simple answer is: yes. But the issue is far more complicated than that, and upon looking a bit more at the issue and a bit more gently at myself, I find that it's not all my fault. I don't think that demeaning or degrading anyone solves the problem. So, let's investigate.
Firstly, it can't be your fault because you've been tricked! You've been told this your entire life. We are constantly assailed by advertisements, which promise us the world. The perfume ad promises to turn you into the minx of the city. The car ad promises to make you into the family man (which will make your wife the happy lady she was hoping to be). People grow up in these environments that quietly encourage them to remedy their insecurities through shopping, so it is not at all surprising if the seeds of this idea has been planted in your mind as well.
Secondly, there is some truth behind the idea that materials make us happy. A warm cup of hot chocolate after a long day of work can heal the soul. A three piece suit can sometimes give us the confidence we need to assert ourselves at the job interview. It's easy to look at these experiences and extend our conclusions to say that things are the cures to our ailments, but this is obviously not the case, as there are many exceptions. There are certain things that can make us feel better under certain circumstances, but the abstraction to "all things" and "all circumstances" cannot be made.
So the problem here are that people grow up being taught implicitly that shopping can solve their problems, and through experience they notice that sometimes certain things make them feel better. However, they have their expectations consistently betrayed when shopping repeatedly fails to solve their deepest issues. This gap in expectation and the reality leaves us with a damaged psyche and a ruined Sunday afternoon.
This leads me to the soul-crushing truth: items can make us feel things, but most often, they will not solve our important problems. The problems that people face are far too complex and deeply rooted to be fixed with one purchase. If one truly wants to solve life's problems, one will have to face the problems head on.
So how do we reverse our longtime ritual of collecting items for therapeutic reasons? Many people decide to embrace lifestyles like Minimalism or Essentialism, which encourage people to rid their homes and lives of items and activities that are not core necessities, or even asceticism, which encourages people to avoid indulgences entirely. While I have looked into these lifestyles and agree with many of the core assumptions, I have never really found the need to actively identify with them. I decided to boil them down to the key concepts and explain the essence of them here, and then use them make suggestions for little steps we can take to combat materialism without making the big commitment to lifestyles like Minimalism.
Key idea 1) You have a hierarchy of priorities. There are things that are more important to you than others.
Key idea 2) You can make yourself aware of your hierarchy of priorities though careful observation and periodic reflection.
Key idea 3) Having stuff you don't really care about around you has a net negative impact on your life. You have a scarcity of resources (money, time, and space in your apartment), so spending your money or time or space on things that are relatively unimportant necessarily takes away those resources that could be used instead on relatively important things. Spending our resources on our top priorities is more valuable and makes us feel better. Therefore, getting rid of the things you don't care about positively impacts your life.
The issue boils down to this: you have a decision to make. How should you use your resources? You need to make the criteria for decision-making as true to yourself as possible, and as abundantly clear to yourself as possible. Otherwise, you make poor decisions. This is when that emptiness-on-Sunday-afternoon feeling sets in.
So how do you decide on criteria? Practicing careful observation and periodic reflection are key to developing your criteria. Some helpful questions to think about in this process are: What are your aspirations? What could you not live without? Who are your heroes? What specifically are the qualities or achievements of those heroes that you respect? Be cognizant of your feelings and reactions to things; this is how you collect data on yourself. Next, you analyze this data. Compare your feelings about one thing to your feelings about another. Analyze how you thought and felt about things in the past, make comparisons, and identify themes.
How important is it to you to have many pairs of shoes? Is fashion important to you? Or are you just buying those shoes because your friend says that she read that they are going to be the must-have shoes of spring 2017? Reflect. Feel. Think.
After that, it's a problem of developing the habits or rituals that are conducive to efficient use of your resources. You can reverse the effects that your shopping habit has had on your psyche by replacing that habit with a better one. Replace your shopping habit with a jogging habit or a journal-ing habit or whatever it is sensible people do.
In this way, you don't have to be an ascetic to fight back against the temptation of materialism. We can take some time to reflect on what we truly need, and refocus our lenses on our real priorities: the things that give us joy and meaning.
And, full stop, I guess.
I hope you have some time to reflect on your priorities today.
Love and peace,
Rina
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