The Satisfaction of Stuff & the Psychology of Man
I love architecture and looking at houses, so I often hop on Zillow (or the regional equivalent) and browse homes in the different areas of the world that I travel to.
It always surprises me when I see closets and garages, particularly in America.
Here’s one closet I found recently:
This is one of the marketing images for this home, so this is apparently meant to entice me.
How often does each item get worn?
How many of these items have ever been worn?
How much life satisfaction does this closet provide?
What about the closet below?
Does this closet provide 10x less satisfaction than the first closet?
If not, then what is the point of having the first closet?
Does the first closet provide any more life satisfaction than this one?
Does it provide less than this one?
If you’ve ever cleared out a drawer, garage or closet, you’ve probably had this series of realizations:
- Wow, there’s a lot more stuff here than I thought.
- Wow, it’s satisfying to get rid of this stuff.
The main reason most people buy stuff is because their mind wants to feel good. The easiest and fastest way to feel good, that most people know, is by buying things.
Unfortunately, it’s not even that things make you feel good, it’s the anticipation of getting a thing that feels good. This is why buying things is exciting all the way up until the minute after you acquire them.
And so the process and problem of consumption is fully defined:
- Feel the desire to feel good.
- Buy thing to feel good.
- Feel good for a few seconds.
Because you want to feel good, and because nothing else is providing it, you repeat this process, over and over, for your entire life.
The state of existence with 100 items is the same as the state of existence with 10,000. This pattern will never stop, even if you literally owned the entire planet.
The purchasing things method of feeling good gradually decreases life satisfaction — because things aren’t satisfying, experiences and actions are.
Life satisfaction isn’t positively correlated to being weighed down by things that aren’t satisfying; it’s positively correlated to freedom from unsatisfying things.
You cannot buy or consume your way out of this mental process. You must be aware of your own mental activity, and then choose to not participate in it. And then it will stop.
Our biological programming to feel good with the least effort, combined with societies around the world not set up to provide satisfying environments that make humans feel good without needing to buy things, appears to be our ultimate existential struggle, and will likely lead to our downfall unless it’s addressed, en masse.
