You Won’t Be Happy to Hear This News About Materialism

Do material possessions really make us happy? Of course. So will more possessions make us happier still?

Alas, no. In fact, research on the topic tells us what we might instinctively guess if we dared: Despite our mighty show of “consumer confidence”--that is, our willingness to purchase more and more things no matter what--we’re not getting any happier as a people.

Considering how hard we’re working these days and the storminess in the economy, it’s enough to make you glum, isn’t it? At USC, economist Richard A. Easterlin has pioneered studies on the relationship between materialism and happiness. Fair warning: His findings aren’t likely to make you very happy. But a man who breaks from the dreary conventions of everyday economics to even consider the question of “happiness” in relation to prosperity is someone who deserves our attention.

Happiness, he’s concluded, is not like wisdom. We don’t accumulate it as we go along in life. Neither is happiness like physical prowess. It doesn’t normally deteriorate. In fact, our happiness is more or less a constant in our lives. What we start with as working adults is pretty much what we end up with at the finish line. “Happiness does not change as people progress,” Easterlin found.

That is not to say we are all equally happy, of course. On average, well-to-do people are happier than poorer ones, Easterlin found. People with more things are generally happier than those with fewer. We’re talking averages here, not specific individuals.

But, it turns out, the basic pattern is set early in life when we take our places in the economic hierarchy. After that, Easterlin explained to me, “material aspirations change over the life cycle roughly in proportion to income.” No doubt coaxed along by the billions spent in advertising with the dubious promise of better living.

Social psychologists call it a “hedonic treadmill,” which means we never get ahead of our material wants. We don’t get happier even as our wealth increases and our possessions grow. I think this means that when our closets begin to bulge from too many accumulated clothes, we end up coveting a larger house, and so on. Basically, we come back to the old wheeze: The more you have, the more you need, especially if someone you know already has it.

The trouble is, an array of other studies shows an overall decrease in the happiness of Americans during the last 30 years. We’re losing ground despite material gains and lengthening life spans. Surely, some of this can be explained by the ever-accelerating pace of the hedonic treadmill. We’re working 5% longer than we did in the 1980s, and even more is demanded of us in efficiency, that grimmest of trends.

At some point, our boundless desire for things smacks headlong into the fact that we can only work so hard to pay for them. Then we start depriving ourselves of time at home. Stress creeps up the backbone. Numbed, we lose our hold on the other things in life that contribute to happiness. I’ll take a wild guess and say we’re on the other side of that point already.

But what’s truly surprising is just how little we know about the power of things to keep us happy, how shallowly we ponder the fundamentals of what makes our economy go round and round.

Easterlin and a growing number of social scientists have plunged into the many questions that arise when we try to calibrate the value of, say, a ski boat relative to the consequences of the second job necessary to afford it.

The converse is equally tantalizing: Can we gain, really, by resisting the treadmill? Or is that counter-trend just a fancy?

For the moment, I think it’s safe to say that we understand more about beach erosion or the shape of DNA molecules than the sources of our own contentment in this age of things. I know hardly anyone, for instance, who isn’t nagged by doubts about materialism. At the same time, I don’t know a single person, me among them, who doesn’t desire something more, something better, something new.