Addict Nation (4 page)

It would turn out that I had almost everything I needed to feel comfortable: my favorite music, my hookup to the Internet, and my mom’s countless books. A health food store a few blocks away would keep me supplied with the sage and lavender oils that I love to luxuriate in. I also picked up a few vanilla-scented soy candles and some sticks of pine incense. It didn’t take much for my room to feel, smell, and sound just like home. Right there, that taught me something. What makes a home isn’t the stuff. It’s the sensations, the feelings, and the companionship of the people and animals we love that allow us to identify a certain place as “home.”

This whole experience led me to question my old assumptions about what I “needed” to own. Circumstances had forced me to leave most of my possessions behind, and something magical happened. With less stuff, I began feeling more “right sized.” I felt freer, more mobile, more independent, less distracted by the responsibility of taking care of possessions. The feeling was intoxicating. It reminded me of the “pink cloud” I felt when I first got sober from alcohol years earlier. I had long suspected there was an addictive component to all the stuff I had accumulated over the course of my life: golf clubs that I never used, exercise equipment (that served as a very expensive clothes rack), and dozens of knick-knacks that started out as decorations and ended up as clutter. This experience of suddenly unloading stuff seemed to confirm my hypothesis that we can become addicted to materialism. Millions of people are coming to the same conclusion. And some have shed a hell of a lot.

In 2010, an Austrian businessman named Karl Rabeder decided to give away his entire fortune, estimated at almost $5 million. He announced he was getting rid of his villa in the Alps, his country house, and his planes, antiques, and luxury cars. He told the
Daily
Telegraph,
“For a long time I believed that more wealth and luxury automatically meant more happiness. I come from a very poor family, where the rules were to work more to achieve more material things, and I applied this for many years.” But, said Karl, an inner voice finally began to speak up. “More and more I heard the words: ‘Stop what you are doing now—all this luxury and consumerism— and start your real life.’ I had the feeling I was working as a slave for things that I did not wish for or need. I have the feeling there are a lot of people doing the same thing . . . Money is counterproductive— it prevents happiness to come.” Karl said his plan was to give all his millions to charities in Latin America and live in a tiny hut in the mountains. “My idea is to have nothing left. Absolutely nothing,” was how Karl summed up his plan.
¹

Now, for us non-multimillionaires, that sounds a tad eccentric. Do we really have to give up
all
of our possessions to have a more profound, more meaningful life experience? Heck no. Just like food, we need a certain amount of material possessions to live comfortably and function effectively in an increasingly complicated world. Here’s the really important question:

When Does Our Consumption of Material
Goods Cross a Line into Addiction?

The answer is: when we are consuming material goods for the wrong reasons, not because we really need those items but because we’re scrambling to fill a void. Here’s a common story: an unhappily married woman shops compulsively, spending money she doesn’t have on designer shoes and handbags to escape the sadness she feels at home. Although she’s a well-paid executive, her salary can’t keep up with her cravings. She’s put her family deeply in debt. Her husband worries over whether she has secret credit cards with even more debt he doesn’t know about. Her young daughter complains that she doesn’t spend enough time with her. The woman can’t quit her job because she’s got a flood of bills coming in every month. Yet whatever free time she has is spent buying more stuff. She is trapped in a vortex of addictive consumption and sees no way out.

We amass stuff to distract ourselves from painful, unpleasant feelings and inconvenient truths that would otherwise rise to the surface
.
We are also consuming for the wrong reasons when we buy something to give us status, in order to erase our feelings of insecurity. That’s called
positional consumption,
because we hope it improves our position compared to someone else. Overconsumption is just like an addiction to drugs: we overconsume to escape, comfort ourselves, and numb ourselves. If you want to know if you’re consuming addictively, you may want to answer these questions:

Do you ever feel remorse after buying/consuming something? When you’ve bought a car/boat/time share/club membership/clothes/furniture/appliances, have you experienced an initial rush that was followed by nervousness, second guessing, and/or guilt?

Do your shopping sprees threaten your (or your family’s) financial security?

Do you consume/shop to escape from worry or to erase a case of the blues?

Do you fantasize that one specific purchase or material thing will make your life complete?

Do you purchase things that you think will make you appear important and/or rich?

Do you buy things hoping that they will impress other people?

Do you buy things and then later wonder about the wisdom of the purchase?

Do you covet things your friends and neighbors possess?

If you answered yes to more than a couple of these questions, you may well be consuming addictively, at least sometimes. Most of us are.

“The way that our culture is set up requires people to believe that it’s important to work hard, to make a lot of money, in order to have a lot of possessions or to make more money. That’s what keeps the wheels of consumer capitalism going. Materialism and high levels of consumption and shopping in some ways are a socially acceptable kind of addiction.”

—Tim Kasser, author of
The High Price of Materialism

America Is Using Materialism to Escape

This overconsumption of material goods is one of our most ingrained social contagions. Our entire culture has become premised on the notion of acquiring. It’s the litmus test of whether you are a card-carrying citizen. Think of a band of hippies in the sixties living in a commune where it was
de rigueur
to drop acid. If you refused, you weren’t really part of the cult and might be shunned or viewed with suspicion. Today, all of us are members of
the cult of
consumerism
. That’s why we call ourselves consumers.