Shoppers beware: a materialist ethos is more misery-inducing than we thought

             CANBERRA      pic satish sharma

Shoppers beware: a materialist ethos is more misery-inducing than we thought

Seeking happiness through material acquisition is associated with loneliness and worse responses to traumatic events

OLIVER BURKEMAN

You're already aware, I assume, that buying stuff is a terrible way to try to achieve happiness or fulfillment. For one thing, it's people rather than things that feature most centrally in our reflections on what happiness is really about. For another, if you must attempt to buy happiness, you're far better off buying experiences – and, by extension, the happy memories that will result – than buying clothes, gadgets or cars. But new research delivers a further blow to materialism's reputation: it looks like it's also associated with more misery in seemingly unrelated areas of life.

In a study published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, researchers from American and Israeli universities investigated levels of post-traumatic stress among residents of a town in southern Israel that came under sustained Palestinian rocket attacks six years ago. Highly materialistic individuals, they discovered, exhibited far higher levels of post-traumatic stress, and were much more likely to try to soothe themselves via compulsive shopping. That last part maybe isn't especially surprising. But the first part is. Your stress levels in response to a mortal threat wouldn't seem to have anything to do with your feelings about shopping and happiness. But as one of the researchers, Aric Rindfleisch, put it, the results suggest that "if you're a materialistic individual and life suddenly takes a wrong turn, you're going to have a tougher time recovering from that setback than someone who is less materialistic."

It's far from clear why this should be so, although a second part of the study, conducted among Americans, found that materialist attitudes are closely linked to self-esteem and death anxiety. People with a less secure sense of themselves are more likely to go to pieces after a threat to their lives, and also more likely to seek solace in shopping.

That's particularly intriguing in the context of a paper (PDF) in this month's Journal of Consumer Research, publicised over the summer, fleshing out the links between materialism and loneliness, based on longitudinal data from thousands of Dutch people. The study – by Rik Pieters, of Tilburg University in the Netherlands – didn't condemn materialism unilaterally. People who simply think of shopping as a pleasurable activity, Pieters found, do indeed find some real, uncomplicated happiness in it. But people who use material goods as a measure of success – or who use shopping to try to relieve unhappiness in some other area of life – get trapped in what's been called the "loneliness loop". They shop in part to relieve feelings of loneliness – yet the result is that it makes their loneliness worse.

All this provides an interesting counterbalance to the interminable debate about whether or not there's a threshold of personal income, or per capita GDP, above which more money stops making us happier. Research on both sides of this question gets reported all the time, often accompanied by commentary suggesting it's the final word on the matter. But these investigations of materialist attitudes point to an important clarification: how much money you have and the attitude you take towards it are two different things.

It may well be that having more money would make some or even most of us happier. Undoubtedly, there are millions of people on the planet who'd be happier if they had more money. But at the same time, most of us might well be happier if we could learn to value money – and, specifically, the material stuff it can buy – a little less.

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2013/dec/02/shoppers-beware-materialism-worse-than-thought