Out of curiosity what time period does your professor (or the reading materials) define as the age of “consumer culture”?
And what evidence do they bring to bear that such is changed?
Is this another HG vs agrarian/herder bit or specifically dinging on the most recent generation of Western Civilization, or even specifically American culture? Are they claiming that ancient Egyptians or Chinese say did not care about their stuff and the status that stuff represented?
If the focus is on the most recent generation or so in America then it must be noted that parents actually are spending more time with their kids than they did 50 years ago. 50 years ago many mothers were more similar to the way you previous source had claimed HG mothers were: at home not interacting with the kids much as they did the other work maintaining the home. Now both parents often spend much time (at the expense of earning more money working more) with the children. Time is spent even more than things.
Did you read my post where I said “It will probably be hard, peer pressure and all that, but certainly not impossible.” Guess not.
And the choice* is *simple while the execution may, or may not be, hard.
As to the choice say to yourself: I don’t want things to have things. I want things that serve a purpose, are a reasonable price and will be used often. Then follow it. This is why we have a 7 year old car that I plan on driving until it dies even though I could afford go to buy a new car. This is why we stay at cheap hotels when we travel even though we can afford much more. This is why we buy jeans at CostCo for 15 bucks a pair instead of Levi’s at 50 bucks a pop.
Where did I get this attitude? My parents. They made a lot of money. When I grew up I had Keds instead of Nikes. I bitched a little (really, it wasn’t much) because we did stuff.
No, we are not. ‘Doing things’ will be things like going to the park, playing games, etc. These days they call it ‘quality time’. But I am glad you know what I plan to do, even moreso that I do myself.
Yes, there are people care deeply about status. My wife and I aren’t those people and are going to raise our kids, to the best of our abilities, to not give a damned about status.
A friend of mine, Brian, cares about status. He and his wife make about twice what we do because my wife is a stay at home mom. Their kids always have the most expensive clothes. They have marble in the bathrooms, drive brand new cars all the time and are always on the edge of disaster. Like a month away. And they cannot do anything except service their debt.
They made that choice and will end up working until they die. We are making a different choice. I plan to retire at 55 with enough to do nice things with my family and live comfortably.
I don’t have a problem with your post generally, but these days this is the definition of pursuit of experiences rather than pursuit of things.
You and monstro seem to be saying mostly the same things, just approaching it from different directions. Yes, all parents can emphasize experiences over things. But not all things are merely about status while some experiences are. In addition, more affluent parents can provide a wider range of both things and experiences than poorer ones.
It’s extremely complex and, worse, changes every moment of a kid’s life. And what your kids will think about your choices when they became adults is unknown to you as it is to all parents.
Experiences have become the new status symbol, the latest cudgel to beat people over the heads with. Just like people can get silly notions in their head about the quality of their material possessions being a reflection of their worth, people can do the same thing wrt the quality of their experiences. Seems to me the lesson shoudn’t be “Wanting things is bad!” I think as long as kids learn to not look at what everyone else has or is doing when defining their worth, they’re going to be fine. You aren’t a loser if you don’t own the latest gaming system. And you’re not a loser if your family doesn’t laugh over supper at the dining room table every night like the wholesome families do on TV. Neither of these things are essential to happiness.
I kind of felt like a giant weirdo when I was in college because my peers loved to party and do things like go to Florida for spring break, while I was a perfect homebody, content staying home with my “things” and my solitude. I didn’t want to experience the party life, and yet I still felt the pressure enough to feel like I should want it. I was sure that I was missing out on something good, even if I couldn’t imagine how. But in retrospect, I believe resisting that tug was a smart move for me. A lot of naive, socially inept adults like myself get into trouble when they try to “keep up with the Jones’s” on the social front. So I would teach my hypothetical kids to resist the pressure of “keeping up” in any shape or form. Don’t buy a pair of shoes just because that’s what the cool kids wear, and don’t jump off a cliff just because all the cool kids are doing it.
I can think of worse things in the world than someone who lives a retiring life without a whole bunch of novel experiences but who takes comfort in interesting things.
Your friend is no worse off than people who blow their money on expensive vacations and extravagant weddings. His problem is money management, not the fact that he likes nice things.
Count me as one who does not. What you describe does not seem like your peers going to Florida as a status symbol. You enjoyed the experience of being a homebody; they enjoyed the group social experience of a Florida Bacchanal.
Did families that could afford to never before spend money on experiences for their children, be it a special trip to the circus, or the lake, or the World’s fair? Did families never before spend more than they probably “should” on such?
Do we “spend” our time as well as our money? Yes. Is a parent who chooses to spend more time playing with their children rather than spending that time earning more money to buy more items (be they objects or vacations or whatever) giving their kids a status symbol?
Neither things or experiences need break the bank, “spending” for both can be done out of need, for the pleasure, or to signal information about values to others, including a search for “status.”
And that is none of that is anything “new.”
The premise of the op is that there is more status seeking behavior in current than there was in the past cultures. Is that true?
But only one of us is commonly portrayed as a “loser”.
Sorry, I have no idea what you’re asking here. Can you perhaps re-phrase what you’re asking?
Anything can be turned into a status symbol.
Sure, if your idea of “quality experience” is making mudpies with your kids in the backyard, it’s not likely your kids will end the day with a big head. But if your “play” involves taking them out to the lake house so you can spend the whole day water skiing, then your kids may easily feel like they’ve got an edge over the other kid who spends his weekends making mudpies. Kids can and do try to one-up each other over anything. Simply swapping things for experiences doesn’t teach them that one-upmanship is wrong. That is really what they should be learning, IMHO. Not that there is something wrong with “things”.
That’s my freakin’ point. Parents can teach their kids to value simple things just like they can teach them to value simple experiences. It’s neither things OR experiences that are the problem. The problem is when people put too much value on symbols. It doesn’t matter what those symbols look like. A symbol is still a symbol.
Like, reading to your children and playing catch with them in the backyard are great, wholesome things. But they do not equate to great parenting. If your parents don’t do these things with you, that doesn’t mean you’re an abused child who lives in deprivation. Contrariwise, giving your kids the opportunity to treat themselves to material objects whenever they can afford it does not mean you’re training them up to be capitalist pigs. What I’m saying is that a statement like “I am teaching my kids to value experiences, not things” ignores the fact that experiences aren’t inherently better than things. Someone who values experiences is no more immune to status-seeking or greed than someone who values things. Not all things are the same, and neither are all experiences.
I don’t know, not being a sociologist or a historian. But it would not surprise me if we are. People have a million ways to compare themselves to others nowadays, and the media is always finding new ways to make people feel inadequate and deprived so they will spend more money.
I also believe that the perceived squeeze on the middle class is also making people much more class-anxious, and this anxiety is causing some people to be even hungrier for status symbols. But since overt consumerism is kind of déclassé, people nowadays are “flashing” their worth in other ways, via Facebook and Pinterest. Witness the DIY ethos of hipsterism. “Look at me, spending $200 to turn an old wooden pallet into a coffee table! I’m into simple living, not like those rubes who shop at Target and IKEA.” Or these people. Letting everyone know that you’re the kind of guy who is into van living is just another way of announcing to everyone how financially comfortable you are. Actual poor people don’t do this kind of shit.
I have a friend at work who is on Facebook. Almost every week, her 26-year-old daughter posts pictures of restaurant food on her Facebook page. This is a young woman who pleads poverty every time her mother asks her to pay off her credit card (which is in her mother’s name) and phone bill (which is in her mother’s name), but somehow she has the money to go to nice restaurants. And she takes pictures of these outings because this is what all of her friends do. She’s “Keeping up with the Jones’s”. Were people doing this kind of “flashing” back when you were in your 20s? Well, I don’t know. Not only did people not go out to eat as frequently back then, but there was no Facebook to give hourly updates on one’s “status”. But ya’ll were buying houses–something that 20-somethings today aren’t doing as much for understandable reasons. Houses are a great way of messaging financial stability and success. But it’s undeniable that there is nothing like a Facebook page to show the “highlight reels” of one’s life. So because of this, I think young people are much more likely to both be seduced by symbols of success and feel self-loathing because they lack those symbols.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think monstro’s point is that the OP’s post (and sleestak’s followup) seems to assume that “material culture” is inherently inferior to some sort of “experience-oriented” aesthetic, and that that assumption misses a lot of nuance about the role and utility of both material god and diverse experiences in a person’s life. People reject material goods and the desire for material goods as sinful, and celebrate the quest for experiences as laudable, but it’s not that simple. Experiences can be as much about establishing social capital as about self-actualization and material goods can be vital and fulfilling tools in the process of self-development. Blanket promotions or indictments of either is facile.
What do you object to in that summary?
It’s also the kind of thing it’s easy to be smug about when you are relatively affluent because you see a pretty luxurious level of material goods as the baseline. So you have people who live in a 2400 sq ft house and spend $250/kid on Christmas, and travel with their family every year a couple times bragging about how they spend money on “experiences” because they are comparing themselves to the people who live in a 3400 sq ft house and spend $1000/kid on Christmas and don’t have money to travel. But for working class parent, the question might be more whether to do Christmas presents at all, or go to Six Flags for a day. And from that point of view, being snarky about “we put experiences first” seems really myopic. Wanting to have nice things isn’t always a character flaw.
Wanting nice things isn’t the character flaw, the flaw is in wanting them as status symbol, to gain some sense of superiority from them. Whether it’s things or experiences doesn’t matter to me, but have we placed this desire above more sensible concerns? I see people who can’t afford to eat or sleep under a roof every day who have cell phones. Is this sustainable?
Going back to the start for a bit of a fresh look.
I want to take note, that in the opening statements, there are some leaps of reasoning being taken, or assumptions being made, which might not be accurate. We might increase our insight, if we explore those a bit.
One such consideration, is the assumption that all or even most instances of materialist competition with children are entirely artificial. Another is that the phenomenon of peer competition is significantly up to the parents.
Last note for now, is it possible that this kind of competition amongst children over toys OR experiences, is actually a good preparation for the much more impactful competition amongst adults, for resources and freedoms? after all, whether the potential mate who owns a yacht is REALLY going to provide a better parenting experience for future generations or not, doesn’t matter, if the partners who choose them THINK that they will. The world that results, that we all have to deal with, isn’t the result of what IS true, it’s the result of what everyone collectively THINKS is true.
Or perhaps to be more precise, what people THINK is reality, is what controls their choices. What results is the intersection of those choices with what really IS true, but what IS true, doesn’t erase the effect of what was only imagined.
Well, if a hungry homeless person has a cell phone, I doubt it’s because they are trying to impress anyone. It may or may not be a good idea (how does one become not homeless if you don’t have a phone number?) but at that point it’s not about status.
But even when it is, I’m not convinced it’s black and white. For example, in my experience most poor and working class parents work really hard–and I suspect often sacrifice more practical things–so that their kids can have something nice. A pair of sneakers, a nice smart phone, a good laptop–something. And I totally identify with that urge: it’d be terrible not to be able to give your kids anything they wanted. And part of what people want is status. They want to be the object of envy once in a while. I don’t think that’s a terrible urge, or something that ought to be utterly stomped out of a kid. There’s limits, of course: giving your kid one thing they really want but then having to feed the family pancakes for a week is really different than giving them everything they want and then not being able to afford to send them to college. But I’m not going to condemn the impulse.
I’ve brought up this example before, but I’ll do it again. When I was in high school, only kids from middle and upper-middle class families were into thrift store clothing. Poor and working class kids were probably wearing thrift store clothes too, but they didn’t brag about it like the wealthier kids did. Rather, they were more into obtaining fashionable name brands items. The wealthier kids (the group I considered myself a part of) could afford to eschew materialism because they had a ream of other status symbols to choose from, whether they realized it or not. If you come to school in a Volvo every morning, no one is going to think you’re a bum, even when you’re dressed like one. You can easily take a devil-may-care attitude about a lot of things when you’re at the top of the social hierarchy. I’m sure our smugness about the superiority of thrift store clothing really worked the poor kids’ nerves.
I don’t think that’s a good example. Cell phones are no longer a luxury item. It’s pretty difficult to get a job or stable housing if people can’t reach you 24/7. If these homeless people are carrying around the latest iPhones with all the bells and whistles, that’s one thing. But you can buy a no-frills smartphone from the grocery store for dirt cheap now.
Sorry but again meh as to what this has to do with the subject of the op.
Yeah, teen aged kids, heck adults, are often making a conscious choice about what image they want to project with their clothing choices and your SES group impacts what you desire to project. Even without intent we signal about who we are, what we want to be, and who we want others to think we are, with what we wear. I wear my “Never trust an atom: they make up everything.” t-shirt and I am advertising something different about myself than if I wear something fancy name brand.
But the op is, I believe, making the contention that modern “material culture” has us all “buying” love and emotional worth from others (in contrast to some mythic past). Accept that such purchases can be with expensive and status laden experiences as well as material objects. And?
Love and value has pretty much always been expressed in what we give to others relative to what we can afford. Be it things and experiences that are purchased or time we spend that we could be devoting to other people, other activities, or earning more money to get more things.
I don’t know if you missed this, but my initial post to this thread wasn’t a response to the OP. It was to someone else’s assertion that teaching kids to value experiences over things will prevent them from deriving love and self-worth from status symbols.
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Love and value has pretty much always been expressed in what we give to others relative to what we can afford. Be it things and experiences that are purchased or time we spend that we could be devoting to other people, other activities, or earning more money to get more things.
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To quote you, “And”? People have always done everything under the sun. I don’t think it is such a horrible topic to debate whether status-seeking through consumerism has gotten worse in this age of social media and socially accepted-narcissism OR to discuss the best ways to manage in children and young adults the pressure to flash status. I am not interested in the former topic as much as the latter. Is that alright with you? :rolleyes:
The latest trend in retailing is the selling of “experiences, not products”. So I think we’re good going forward. The corporations are busy correcting this flaw in our culture.
I mean, have people ever read “The Great Gatsby” or have any awareness of what life was like in the past?
Holy smokes, I don’t mean to sound snarky but how often do we have to have the “darned kids today” conversation? It has always been like this. Your contempt for people with cell phones - and I wonder how a person can run, say, a half assed job search without a phone number - was the same contempt people used to have for lower class people struggling along who had the nerve to own a TV, or a car, or to have hot water, or (go back however long you want.)
Yeah I did and understood that he meant doing things as in spending time as a family, not searching for status experiences. That was not clear to you so he made it explicit in a following post:
His contention was on target for the thread: he and his wife are wanting to raise their kids to not care about status. He knows that such may be difficult to accomplish but such is his intent. (He also has retiring early and living modestly as high priority.)
But yeah, you kept on after he corrected your misunderstanding of his point with more on how “[e]xperiences have become the new status symbol”
Experiences can be purchased like things can be, experiences can be used as status symbols like things can be, purchased experiences can be used to try to demonstrate and to buy emotional attachment just like purchased things can be? Both immaterial and … no duh. No one was saying anything to the contrary. Sorry to be getting snarky at this point but thanks for bloviating upon your unique “insight” here.
So one, you responded to something you imagined someone meant, not related to the op, and continued as if that was what was meant (with a discussion that has nothing otherwise to do with the thread) after he made it crystal clear that you were misunderstanding his point.
And two, “have become” is potentially at least on subject … it is consistent with the op’s contention that a search for status (and affection) by way of purchase is something new. And my question to you in regard to that was the same as to him: which possibly mythic past era are you thinking of when people did not demonstrate their affection for others by buying them stuff and experiences? When were stuff and experiences not used by some to try to impress others? The op might be thinking about HG times again. Are you?
Sure that’s alright with me. Maybe you should make a thread about it? But as you note you were not responding to the op and were instead reacting to what you misunderstood someone meant, continuing to do so after he made it explicitly clear that you had misread his meaning.
Also maybe if you want to make the GD contention that “status-seeking through consumerism has gotten worse in this age of social media” you might want to bring some evidence that it has indeed gotten worse, other than “it would not surprise me if we are” and dismissing the point that it has, at least for the history of civilization, pretty much always been this way with a well “…[p]eople have always done everything under the sun …”
Look I get that you like the experience of hanging out with your nice stuff by yourself. And no one was dissing your enjoying that experience. But reacting to someone who hopes to demonstrate his love for his kids not by purchases but by spending time with them playing games, reading to and with them, and going to the park together, with comments on how experiences are the “new” status symbol, is just, well, random.
Don’t misunderstand me - I did/do not parent exactly as sleestak does. Personally I do not believe that purchased nice things (or nice experiences, like vacations or a semester abroad) automatically means using those things for status and I think that one who has the budget to allow one’s self, and one’s loved ones, to have non-schlocky stuff and interesting experiences that can only be had by purchase, can do so without being motivated by status, and can simultaneously both teach your children to look down on the ostentatious and on those who do in order to impress and to place themselves above others.
And in regards to your unrelated subject - I do not see social media increasing consumerism. It allows those who seek belonging or status by purchase to advertise what they have bought more efficiently and widely maybe, but I see no reason to believe that there are more of them than ever. OTOH social media reputation as currency or wealth (Cory Doctorow’s whuffie concept maybe) if anything diminishes the status importance of those purchases … look even at this board. There are some very wealthy people I am sure with relatively low status among other posters and some who have been very open about their dire economic circumstances who have great status as intelligent, insightful, and witty posters. George Takei is not likely in the top 500 wealthiest in the world in cash equities but he is #321st most wealthy in Twitter followers. Not by advertising his consumerism either. Social media currency as wealth to some degree can function as a different playing field from the dollars-based one. (Oh there is cross-over between the worlds to be sure - see various other celebrities.)
As to the op though RickJay nails it: “It has always been like this” - pretty much anyway.
