Turn on your phone and start scrolling. What do you see? We’re surrounded by celebrities, influencers, and other online personalities telling us how much money they make – and how much they spend. Foreign cars, designer brands, penthouse suites, stacks of cash: what’s going on here?
Those boasting about their wealth aren’t bragging about their ability to meet economic needs, or to feed their family. Money isn’t being presented as a means to an end, but as an end in itself. Buying stuff purely so other people see it is referred to in sociology as ‘conspicuous consumption’, and people do it to try and increase their ‘social status’ – what other people think of us, and whether they respect us. Our ‘value’.
Materialism is the belief that value comes from economic productivity, wealth, and conspicuous consumption. It is a both a way of living and a way of judging – judging a person’s value. People brag about their assets to assert their social status, their worth, and their power as an individual. And the flipside is that they devalue people who aren’t ‘successful’ in the materialist paradigm. Every time a rapper, influencer, or someone you know calls a fellow human being ‘brokeboy’, or ‘povvo’, they are doing it to demean them, to dismiss what they have to say. It establishes a status hierarchy, with the big earner at the top. He matters more.
But the people online who mockingly ask ‘What colour is your Bugatti?’ are just the symptoms, not the root cause. The real problem is that a materialist value system has snuck its way into being dominant in our current society. And when we don’t consciously question the norms and values we grow up with, we internalise them without thinking. You see it whenever someone judges how ‘successful’ you are based on your paycheck, or turns their hobby into a side hustle to stay ‘productive’, or looks down on you for having a ‘worse’ job. Do they really enjoy this Darwinian economic competition for basic respect, or have they just been socialised into accepting it as natural by online personalities and billionaire-owned media outlets?
Materialism is presented by the people on your screens and the suits in power as a given, as just ‘human nature’. But if we stop for just a moment to question the rationality of the norms we’re spoon-fed, that mirage evaporates. The idea that we should value wealth and consumption is not a given. It is a contemporary sociological phenomenon whose origins and premises can be examined scientifically; just as any other brazen assertion about human nature can. We don’t need to blindly trust strangers trying to sell us the law of the jungle: there’s a sizeable body of scientific evidence on where materialism really comes from, what really leads to social status, and what really makes us happy and fulfilled in life.
Human beings do have a built-in instinct to accumulate things – although of course the extent to which they feel (or act on) this varies a lot. We evolved this, because it was an evolutionary adaptation that benefitted us in the context for which it evolved. As wandering hunter-gatherers, it was important that our ancestors were motivated to gather resources. Having an instinct to do this was useful because, it was naturally limited by our carrying capacity and by the scarcity of resources in our ancestors’ environment.
It was also in harmony with the many other survival adaptations in our psychological toolkit: for example, the instincts to care, bond, cooperate, and share. These adaptations were essential for motivating human beings to work together, which was essential for their survival. It’s no surprise that in the anthropology literature, hunter-gatherer bands are famously egalitarian and collaborative: in fact, many actively discourage material accumulation. But human beings soon changed the environments they lived in, forming complex agricultural – and then industrial – societies. And evolution couldn’t keep up. That instinct to hoard, no longer needed and no longer limited, never went away.
Materialism is an arbitrary decision to turn that narrow slice of human behaviour into a whole worldview. It dials back some of the psychological tools that make us human – rationality, compassion, collaboration – and amplifies those instincts to gather. As a value system, it is something of a cognitive shortcut: that just because the instincts to hoard things and beat others can come to us easily, it should guide our behaviour and morality.
Now let’s talk social status. Social status evolved in humans as a mechanism to get us to work together: because study after study illustrates that what actually leads to social status, once we sweep away all the norms and the narratives, is ‘prosocial’ behaviour: behaviour that benefits, and is nice to, other people. Evolution got us to cooperate by hardwiring us to care about whether other people approve of us, and then making that approval contingent on cooperation.
This all makes intuitive sense. When you see a cool car on the street, do you think ‘wow, what a cool driver’ or just ‘wow, what a cool car’? And if that driver got out and acted obnoxiously to you or someone else, you’d lose respect for them in a moment. When you listen to most hip-hop you almost expect the artist to talk about how rich, how dangerous, how cool they are. If anyone in real life ever told you they were any of these things, you would immediately think they were a loser.
Finally, will materialism give you a good life? The overwhelming weight of genuine, quality-assessed, evidence-based scholarship tells us that in reality, materialism is self-defeating. It locks you onto an endless hamster wheel of hunting for more and more wealth and consumption, driven by an instinct which can never be switched off. All the rat race does is shunt you away from what you really need.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes human nature as ‘90% chimp, 10% bee’. A lot of the time, we do act like selfish apes, following our own self-aggrandising instincts and putting ego first. But real fulfilment and meaning in life come only when we transcend that; when we become a part of something greater than just number one. Do you enjoy feeling useful? Do you enjoy loving others and being loved? Does it feel good to do good? Why do so many people volunteer, give blood, or work in charities?
Human beings are social animals. We were never meant to be self-contained economic agents interacting with other transactionally for maximal profit. All this kind of society does is produce a mass of atomised individuals who feel lost, apathetic, and anxious. Society’s materialistic values don’t meet our innate human needs for community, compassion, and meaning. Materialism fails to understand that wellbeing comes from others, not zeroes. It comes from giving to society rather than relentlessly taking: this is not a bleeding-heart liberal plea, but a basic psychological consensus.
We need to base our society’s value systems on what will actually help us: this is rational. Accumulation for the sake of it is not. Whenever someone tries to flex what they have, what they’re really drawing attention to is what they lack. The vacuity of materialism doesn’t bring contentment. Get out of the grind, get into nature, and stop to smell the flowers. By dropping out of the rat race, you’ve may have already won.
