When I give it some thought, I want to come to the conclusion that my material possessions have little to do with who I am. I own a few things that make me happy, but I always hope that these things don’t define me. But that’s not true. While they don’t fully define you, your possessions, or lack thereof, do partially shape you. Who can deny that wealth creates opportunity, right? Who dares to deny that poverty or debt is a burden that weighs heavily? But why do we overextend that principle to include material possessions that, in general, don’t create opportunities? Like luxury goods?
It’s undeniable that a man’s worth is often judged by what he owns instead of who he is. A surface-glimps is all we need to judge who he is and what he could be worth to our own advancement. We have made up our minds before we know whether he sold his soul, lied, cheated or stole the money he has. For the most part we don’t really care, we just want to know how he can be involved in our own advacement. If he wears the right clothes, drives the right car, has the right friends, then that’s all that matters. We start to treat those we meet as opportunities too, just like we consider possessions. In a sense, those we meet become possessions just like everything else in our lives. Our lives are consumed by a very selfish, self-absorbed quest for possessions, and at a certain point it no longer has anything to do with opportunities or security, it just becomes an obsession.
The driving force behind civilisation, and it hasn’t always been that way, is individual material gain, and it’s praised because greed, as Gordon Gecko says, is good and somehow leads to collective advancement. So if you gather material possessions, you are actually helping others, so it is said. Consumption is for the public good, which is why the economic stimulus package that was released in the U.S. recently, in the form of checks sent to many households, are meant to push consumption, to increase spending. It’s long been understood that a society that’s based on the principles of the individuality and consumption, will destroy itself over time. It can only continue to function as long as everyone can keep pretending that what they do is for the good of all, and that the world is an infinite resource from which this consumption can be drawn and that consumption itself has no negative repercussions like exploitation and pollution.
I’m in conflict; on the one hand I believe that I am more than just a consumer, and that I am more than the sum of my possessions, and I believe that it won’t be long before the advancement of the individual and society (in this case the global society) will be ruled by compassion, sympathy and the understanding that our consumption no longer needs to spiral out of control and lead to uncontrolled harvesting of natural resources, exploitation of the underpriviledged and pollution, and that I should live my life keeping that in mind. On the other hand, I feel this sickening need to engage in the rat-race that governs almost all of us. We’re constantly competing with one another and I feel the need to compete, too. This duality, and the struggle for dominance between one and the other, is very much a part of me, and from one day to the next I can’t quite say which one is dominating the other, which leads to strange flip-floppery of my self-image.