Materialism: Does It Create Selfishness, or Does Selfishness Create Materialism?

Covetousness pulls people off course more often than they admit. We look at what the neighbors own, or we get swept up by an ad telling us that the next thing everyone will want is sitting in a store right now. I confess to being a hopeless HGTV viewer. After an hour I'm convinced my kitchen needs granite counters and my beige walls ought to be repainted in some tasteful gray. You and I both already know how this ends: the trend fades, and somewhere a crew shows up with sledgehammers to smash perfectly serviceable cabinets and countertops so the room can be fitted for whatever gets advertised next.

Women's fashion is the sharper version of the same trap, and I'm no exception. I can feel the moment my closet starts looking dated, and out go clothes I could still wear, tossed or donated simply because they've slipped out of style. There's a glossy fashion magazine I read where a single item runs into the thousands. A few of those pieces really are lovely, and I'd happily own one, except the money isn't there. I did once splurge on a designer purse and felt proud carrying it, and I carried it until it fell apart. No surprise there.

Paying more for a well-built, name-brand shoe or bag that lasts for years doesn't bother me one bit. The same logic holds for clothing. Yet I keep seeing flimsy garments with no lining and none of the interior structure that would normally add to the price of a dress, blouse, or skirt. Men seem to escape this. Their clothes cost real money too, but the construction holds up, and the styles barely move from one year to the next.

Cars get engineered for planned obsolescence as well. What I'd want is something attractive and mechanically sound, a car I couldn't easily wear out, one I wouldn't trade in until it actually gave out or until a newer model turned up with features that didn't exist when I bought mine. You can read the health of an economy in used cars: when older vehicles start climbing in value, it usually means people can no longer afford new ones.

Vintage clothing, furniture, and odds and ends are having a moment, with buyers hunting them down. Keep in mind that vintage and antique aren't the same; a thing has to get considerably older before it crosses into antique territory. How pleasant it would be if more people trusted their own taste and bought things that were genuine and well made precisely because they couldn't be swapped out on a whim.

Do we chase objects instead of experiences? And when we do have an experience, do we grade it by the price of the stuff involved rather than by how it actually felt? Weddings are the obvious case. People will rank the day they got married by what the whole production cost them.

I think of one wedding held on a farm, out on the lawn, with a plain fried-chicken dinner the local grocery store catered buffet style inside a brand-new hay barn. Instead of a towering cake there were individual cupcakes. Appetizers came off an ice cream bar run by a few of the bride's friends.

The bridesmaids picked up their matching sundresses on sale at the local J.C. Penney. A bell choir from the area church handled the music. The bride wore a sample gown rather than a special order. The fanciest outfit on the property belonged to the bride's shepherd dog, who served as flower girl. The men showed up in khakis and polo shirts in colors that worked together.

Guests parked in an open field. Folding chairs went up on the front lawn for the ceremony, and a family member officiated. Now picture the bill if that same couple had hired a caterer, brought in a wedding planner, and booked some special venue. Would anyone have remembered it more fondly?

Owning more breeds clutter, and clutter breeds the need for still more room to stash it all. Plenty of these possessions demand upkeep and eat into hours you could spend elsewhere. The Vanderbilt estate in North Carolina is genuinely worth seeing, packed with rare pieces you won't find anywhere else, but the house and its contents cost so much to preserve that the admission fees required just to maintain it push it toward being too pricey to visit.

There's also the hunger for the status that comes with owning rare and costly things. And of course even those things go out of date and demand replacement by something newer, better built, rarer still. Materialism is simply the love of objects, and it leans heavily on other people to keep reinforcing it.

Strip away everyone's approval and materialism has a hard time surviving. Picture some fad object centuries from now, dug up by a person who has no idea what it was. What on earth would they make of a buried stash of hula hoops?