Collection 5: "Always Wanting More" by Thomas Hine

Throughout most of history, few people had more than a couple of possessions, and as a consequence, people were very aware of each object. Life was austere.

The ability to be bored by a material surfeit was a rare privilege.

“The standard of life is determined not so much by what a man has to enjoy, as by the rapidity with which he tires of any one pleasure,” wrote Simon Patten, the pioneering economist-philosopher of consumption, in 1889.

Patten’s definition of the standard of life was based on superfluity: He expected that people would always have more than they need and would never have all they might want.

We work in order to consume, and we consume in order to somehow compensate for the emptiness of our lives, including our work.

Indeed, there is some evidence that people who feel least fulfilled by their work are the most avid shoppers, while those who love their work find shopping a burden, though they don’t necessarily buy less.

Our materialism is oddly abstract, a path toward an ideal.

We aspire instead to such intangibles as comfort and modernity, qualities for which standards change so rapidly that the buying can never stop.

“Progress is our most important product,” Ronald Reagan used to say during his tenure as spokesman for General Electric.

Indeed, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks, Americans were exhorted not to sacrifice, as is usual in wartime, but to consume.

Can the massive deficit that the United States runs with other countries, which is driven by our hunger for ever more low-priced goods, be sustained indefinitely?

Does our appetite for inexpensive goods from overseas exploit the low-wage workers who make them, or does it give them new opportunities?

Nevertheless, we yawn at a super store rather than marvel at it. That such a store could provoke apathy instead of amazement is a perverse tribute to the plenitude of our consumer society and the weakness of the emotional ties that bind us to the many objects in our lives.

Nevertheless, we yawn at a super store rather than marvel at it. That such a store could provoke apathy instead of amazement is a perverse tribute to the plenitude of our consumer society and the weakness of the emotional ties that bind us to the many objects in our lives.

Nevertheless, we yawn at a super store rather than marvel at it. That such a store could provoke apathy instead of amazement is a perverse tribute to the plenitude of our consumer society and the weakness of the emotional ties that bind us to the many objects in our lives.

And even if a super store is not the noblest expression of personal liberty or the highest achievement of democracy, we should consider that it does provide a setting for exercising a kind of freedom that has threatened tyrants and autocrats for thousands of years. We go to a super store to acquire things that prove our own power.