Living in a material world
Zan Boag: We live in a culture that is obsessed with stuff, yet it’s generally viewed as a negative to be materialistic. Why is this?
Tim Kasser: I think this ambivalence reflects some competing tendencies in the human mind and in human culture. On the one hand, the very earliest writings in philosophy and religion and such – Socrates and Lao Tzu and the Bible and Mohammed and Buddhism – suggest to people that materialism is pretty problematic, that it will crowd out what it means to have a meaningful life, that it will crowd out spiritual strivings, and that it will crowd out authenticity. We can see that in lots of thought that is very, very deeply embedded – especially in Western thinking. At the same time, though, there is this other competing tendency in humans that I think must have been around back then too, because why else would Lao Tzu have critiqued materialism? There was this other tendency that humans are very status-oriented and money-oriented.
In your book The High Price of Materialism you asked university students to write down their goals for the months ahead and rate how happy they’d feel on attaining these goals. Along the way they had to note their progress towards the stated goals, as well as their current levels of well-being. What did your study find?
Most of the research that we do compares materialistic goals for money, image, and status, to what we call goals for aims like one’s personal growth, connections with loved ones and friends, and contributing to the community. Usually what we’re looking at is, relatively speaking, how much effort is somebody investing in the materialistic aims in life, how much do they but it is consistently present and consistently negative across lots of different kinds of samples, not just college students, and lots of different nations, not just America.
