Home Fire #14 - How Not to Want - IV. Make the Right Comparisons

Home Fire

How Not to Want

IV. Make the Right Comparisons

(This is the fourth in a series on how to want less.)

Last but not least in the battle against our urge to splurge culture come two principals of human motivation: adaptation and comparison. These ideas from social psychology can help us get a handle on why we think we need more than we do; plus, they can help us want less, thereby easing the strain on our bank balance and the planet.

As a TA in grad school, I worked 20 hours a week and made minimum wage. After graduation, I found a job as a technical editor. That first paycheck was nearly miraculous: $700! I was so used to living on ramen that I had my student loan paid off within the year. Soon after, my expenses started creeping up - a place with no mice, cable television, more meals out - until $700 a paycheck barely covered it. This is what psychologists studying materialism call adaptation. We get used to new levels of affluence fast. What seemed like a dream come true last year - from high speed internet to owning a house - is now ordinary. We lose our appreciation for them. It’s not a moral failure. It’s how our brains work. Evolution created humans to worry about what’s next, not to relish what has come to pass.

Which brings us to the second term: comparison. Being systemically social creatures, we determine our level of wellbeing by checking our circumstances against those around us. If you happen to know two or three people with cancer, you feel lucky to be disease free. If you know two or three people who have recently come into large sums of money, you feel unlucky to still be shlepping away at your day job.

Comparison is responsible for the finding that, past the median income for any given industrialized culture, money and happiness are not correlated. People earning less than their society’s average income tend to be less happy, but the line below which you can expect more unhappiness is culturally relative. (The research bears out, as we would expect, that true poverty, the inability to meet basic needs, is incompatible with happiness.)

“It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.”

Albert Camus

Once above the median, increases in wealth do not make us happier. We adapt and start looking for what’s next. And where do we look? The new Joneses: media. Television, movies, magazines all give us an outrageously false idea of how everyone else is living. Even the Simpsons couldn’t afford 742 Evergreen Terrace on Homer’s salary.

Hollywood and Madison Avenue teach us from the get go that bigger and more equal better. But we can use the ideas of adaptation and comparison against them. For instance, anywhere above that socially constructed cultural average, and possibly anywhere above true poverty, we can adapt to less as easily as we can adapt to more. As individuals we can create new standards of achievement by which to compare ourselves to others. Having the oldest beater on the block shows your devotion to saving for the future, to reducing resource consumption, to maintaining your possessions. It doesn’t mean you have less money than your neighbors. It might mean you have more in your back account than in your garage. And, yes, we do still compare ourselves to our neighbors. But we can use that in our favor, too. For instance, a person is much more likely to be content with their 2000 square foot home if it is situated among 1500 square foot homes, but may come to resent it if the neighborhood is full of 4000 square foot homes.

Americans are often accused of being a culture of adolescents. It is possible that we retain some of the signature markers of that troubled stage well into adulthood. Marketing, for example, could be seen as peer pressure. Or, take for instance the phenomenon of the “imaginary audience,” named by developmental psychologist David Elkind. Teenagers often go through their days performing for people who aren’t there. They feel they are always being watched and judged. It is part of growing up to realize that, beyond looking professional at work and put together on a date, nobody cares what you look like, what you wear, or what you drive. Everybody is only worried about how they look compared to you.

One curious exercise that can help us rid ourselves of these imagined judgments is to determine who it is you compare yourself to. Who do you think is judging you? What do you really want them to see? Because most likely they are comparing themselves to you, too.

Home Fire

Resources

Frank, Robert, H. Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess.
New York; The Free Press, 1999.

Kasser, Tim. The High Price of Materialism.
MIT Press; Cambridge, MA., 2002.

Myers, David G. “The Social Psychology of Sustainability.”
Global Survival: The Challenge and Its Implications for Thinking and Acting.
Eds. Ervin Laszlo and Peter Seidel.
New York; SelectBooks, 2006. 101- 113.

Schor, Juliet B. Born to Buy:The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture..
New York; Scribner, 2004.

Amy Vaughn