Is Materialism Good For You - A Secular Approach:-)

Carey Goldberg - New York Times

As a Lexington, Massachusetts, psychologist and couples therapist, Aline Zoldbrod is all too familiar with this picture: A husband and wife no longer connect.

They are so exhausted from the pursuit of "nice things" - a big house, private school for the kids, fancy cars - that they are time-starved and depleted. Life is luxurious but unsatisfying and simply no fun.

Zoldbrod said it is not only her clinical experience that tells her such clients are on the wrong track. It's a growing body of research.

Using statistics and psychological tests, researchers are nailing down what clerics and philosophers have preached for millennia: Materialism is bad for the soul. Only, in the new formulation, materialism is bad for your emotional well-being.

In recent years, researchers have reported an ever-growing list of downsides to getting and spending - damage to relationships and self-esteem, a heightened risk of depression and anxiety, less time for what the research indicates truly makes people happy, like family, friendship and engaging work. And maybe even headaches.

"Consumer culture is continually bombarding us with the message that materialism will make us happy," said Tim Kasser, a psychology professor at Knox College in Illinois who has led some of the recent work. "What this research shows is that that's not true."

The research is more nuanced than that, of course. For people who are living paycheck to paycheck, more money unquestionably brings greater well-being. And for the comfortable, a raise or a new purchase can certainly feel good - for a little while, anyway. Also, economic research indicates that a hunger for money can motivate people to perform better and even more creatively.

There is also a question of cause and effect. Feelings of insecurity incline people toward materialist values, the research suggests, and that insecurity can also lead to relationship troubles and other problems associated with a materialistic lifestyle.

But Kasser argues that when people turn to material things to feel better, they compound the problem, because they seek experiences that "don't do a very good job of meeting their psychological needs."

Ed Diener, a University of Illinois psychology professor and happiness expert, said in an e-mail that he has found that "those who value material success more than they value happiness are likely to experience almost as many negative moods as positive moods, whereas those who value happiness over material success are likely to experience considerably more pleasant moods and emotions than unpleasant moods and emotions."

Studies show that poor people who emphasize materialistic goals are especially likely to be unhappy, while in some studies, materialistic rich people show fewer ill effects, presumably because they are meeting more of their goals. But even for the better-off, materialism can create a nagging appetite that can never be satisfied.

Materialism becomes "a more difficult goal than many," Diener said, "because it is open-ended and goes on forever - we can always want more, which is usually not true of other goals such as friendship. With friends, we have them and enjoy them but usually are not taught that we keep needing more."

There's also an opportunity cost to chasing the wrong goals, said Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychology professor who focuses on people's flawed ability to predict their emotional reactions. When people spend their effort pursuing material goods in the belief that they will bring happiness, he said, they're ignoring other, more effective routes to happiness.

So why is materialism so common? The trouble is that the error is subtle.

"If it were the case that money made us totally miserable, we'd figure out we were wrong" to pursue it, Gilbert said. But "it's wrong in a more nuanced way. We think money will bring lots of happiness for a long time, and actually it brings a little happiness for a short time."

Whether warnings from social scientists will make a dent in popular consuming values remains to be seen. Kasser compared the expanding pool of data on the potential harm of materialism to the data on lung cancer caused by smoking. Preachers had long called smoking "the devil's work," he said, but it was only when the cancer connection was proved scientifically that smoking really began to wane.
Gilbert of Harvard, however, is skeptical. "Let's try. Let's give them the data. Let's shout it from the mountaintops," he said. "But let's not be too surprised when all the people in the valley nod their heads knowingly and then go on to covet a Porsche and a new home and tickets to the Super Bowl."