Materialism In American Culture Analysis

With social media playing a huge role in society, us Americans are becoming more materialistic. We are being influenced by people who give us these unrealistic expectations in life and always making us want more in life than what we have. We try living up to these expectations by buying elaborate accessories, when in reality they serve no purpose to us, making us feel empty on the inside.  Like Steinbeck said, “We trample friends, relatives and strangers who get in the way of our achieving it; and once we get it we shower in on psychoanalysts to try to find out why we are unhappy” (Steinbeck). Despite all of this, us Americans still claim to be realistic, yet we pay $800 for a phone just so we can be like everyone else. We buy name brand clothes that are overpriced. We pay $7 for a cup of coffee. The list goes on and on. The American Dream Steinbeck relates to is not something someone can buy, rather is it something you earn. As Steinbeck said, the American Dream is “yearnings toward what we wish were and hope we may be: wise, just, compassionate, and noble. The fact that we have this dream at all is perhaps an indication of its

While “Two Cheers for materialism” by James Twitchell explores the extent to which materialism has become an ample and important aspect of everyday life in our society, the text also highlights our tendency to disregard and question the moral appropriateness of this very integral aspect.

If Tyler Durden from Fight Club was sitting inside $340,000 Lamborghini Aventador, his hatred towards materialism probably would have driven him to accelerate the car right into the ocean. If James Twitchell was sitting inside of it, he probably would have just left the car in a parking structure with the keys still inside. Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club and James Twitchell’s essay “The Allure of Luxury”both take negative against the concept and phenomenon of Western materialism, where society indulge on luxurious items to the extent of being the focus of life. In Fight Club, the idea of anti-materialism is taken to a great extent, with the book’s main character and Tyler focusing on destroying the materialistic society with violence to restore a more primitive way of living. However, in Twitchell’s piece, materialism is taken more moderately, describing how materialism has rapidly expanded throughout the Western nations, questioning the if it is beneficial or malicious. I believe that materialism does provide great benefits that allowed us human beings to advance as a society. However materialism introduces numerous complications that impact our society on a macroscale. Before comparing and contrasting my view of materialism, we will first explore Twitchell’s essay, then Fight Club to first better understand their stance and concept of materialism.

Transcendentalist author, Henry David Thoreau sees materialism as the destruction of society and one’s mind. He articulates this in Walden, “Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.” These strong views from Thoreau are not subject only to him, fellow transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson shares similar views from Self-Reliance, “Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem for each other by what each has, and not by what each is.” These two influential thinkers agree that materialism is ruining civilization and free thinking.

People in the U.S. value life to a lesser degree than those before us, because there is no longer a struggle to merely survive. We’re also severely and absurdly spoiled, with a plethora of food and profusion of inessential products. Unappreciative of more than just life, we’re so greatly endowed that we no longer appreciate beauty, love, relationships, ideas or thoughts to the magnitude our simplistic ancestors did. Materialism is brought on by our consumer culture and has made us shallow, lacking the depth our

Over the past decades, how Americans perceive the marital relationship greatly reformed, illuminating society’s values. In the past, marriage use to represent a legal contract to bear children and acquire finances, but today, “In all too many communities in the US, especially poor and minority ones, marriage is a retreat” (Wilcox et al., 2005, p. 5). Rather than observing marriage as an obligation, Americans now perceive a marriage to entail intimate commitments between affectionate partners. America transformed its values from the society and family to the individual level. Of the major values changes, which occurred over the past decades, this article exemplifies an increase in single-parent homes, cohabiting, and divorce. Due to America’s expansion of individualism and materialism, individuals no longer perceive their marriage as life long commitments. This transformation occurred because of a shift in societal values; society no longer places stigma on divorce and single parents, which aided in the increasing numbers of marital shifts. In fact, Americans tend to enter marriages with unrealistic expectations, expecting their partner to fulfill all of their needs without conflict. It stands as our unrealistic expectations and perceptions that caused a shift in marriages.

There are many Americans that spend their money on too many things not essential to the preservation of our lives and health. Money that we spend on upgrading to a new TV or more fashionable up to date clothing could be donated to one of a number of charitable agencies and can mean the difference between life and death for children in need. Peter Singer agrees with these statements and wrote an essay about it. He describes how most of us would rather spend $200 on dining out in one month, and that same $200 could save a child’s life. I agree with this statement, there are too many of us in our own little bubbles and we don’t worry about what’s going on around us. His thesis isn’t based off of facts or true life events but is based off of

Materialism, a tendency to consider material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values. The want and desire for more things in life beyond things that are necessary, show that Americans will never be content with what they have. In a sense, America has been worshiping material, this can clearly be seen because so many people value their phones an electronic devices almost to the extent of a human life. We as Christians know this is wrong because we refer to what the Bible says in Matthew 6:24, "No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money”. The word money in this verse refers to money and material you buy with it, meaning that you cannot “serve”/worship both God and Earthly items. Materialism has become the American dream to many, an a major part of today's

While many people find happiness without many resources, many Americans see objects as a life necessity. According to Anna Quindlen in her OP-ED “Stuff is not Salvation”, Society has started to gear more and more into spending money on something the saw on the TV add rather, than saving for times of trouble. Americans have become so materialistic that a few hours after celebrating Thanksgiving, a holiday about giving thanks for what you have, they go and trample each other at malls over items on sale. Due to this desire of society to own every new gadget, many Americans are creating unnecessary debt for themselves, all of this for useless resources which we don’t even appreciate.

Brennan Manning’s says that Americans measure success by one’s pile of possessions. Manning talks about a few articles that he read and he found out that the majority of Americans are fat, exhausted, frustrated, lustful, and dissatisfied with their level of achievement because we care about being overweight, and how to maintain a nice body, and caring a lot about all of these useless things. He states that a lot of Americans’ conversations revolve around consumption, including what we buy/bought, where/what to eat, the price of things, what’s on sale, etc. Americans show a lot of interest in this materialistic items when they won’t even matter when we die. The things that matter in our life should be non-materialistic items and that we should

In a materialistic society, one measures the worthiness of its members according to their wealth. For many Americans across many generations, material possessions have determined social status and overall value to society. This rating system has been the subject of blistering critique from early on in human society when money was deemed “the root of all evil”, to the 1920’s when F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a criticism of materialism in his book The Great Gatsby. Americans today still try to acquire the lavish trappings of the wealthy. Although equating money to happiness is no longer socially acceptable by most people, the want for more materials and tendencies to depend on alcohol in times of trouble that Fitzgerald critiqued is still valid today.

There is a strong relationship between human material culture and the development of human cognitive abilities. Around the 2.0 Ma period there was a widespread of evolutionary change across a vast range of mammals (Foley, R. and Gamble, C. 2009), one of the largest factors contributing to the growth of cognitive abilities is a larger brain size (Delagnes, A.and Roche, H. 2004). A larger brain allowed for humans to expand their thinking which enhanced their lives. A significant step in the history of humans and technology is when they started using tools (Wynn. T. 2009). "The enhanced working memory that appears to have accompanied the evolution of modern humans enabled much higher levels of innovation, thought experiment, and narrative complexity" (Wynn, T. and Coolidge, F.L. 2004). The changes in human cognitives abilities can be reflected by changes in human material culture.

As Austrian writer Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach wrote,“To be content with little is difficult; to be content with much, impossible.” History and literature have established that the ideal goal every American has wanted is for his thirst for material possessions to be reached, but even then, the individual isn’t truly happy. Money, and the things it can get you, have long been a part of American culture and the materialist culture of society have been examined in numerous ways from novels to the art of those like Andy Warhol. A life free from the economic woes that plague almost everyone seems like the quintessential existence, but material wealth is not a way to mend issues.

In the short story, multiple elements of material/non-material culture are portrayed. Material culture is composed of tangible items that are symbolic or hold meaning to a society such as having a car. Non-material culture consists of ideas, morals and values that hold importance a society or culture. This story illustrates the effect culture can have in our behavior and how it shapes our society, it just comes to support the idea that culture and society are dependent on each other in order to thrive. In order to comprehend material and non-material culture we will first have to separate the both an apply them to context.

American culture refers to the traditions and practices of the people of the United States. Culture comprises of the nature of buildings, religion, music language and marriage. The population of the United States is more than 320 million people making it the most culturally diverse country in the globe. Books such as Crabgrass Frontier, Manifest Destination and Muscular Christianity are important sources of information about American culture. This paper is a reflection on the methods that these books use in providing information about the evolution of the US culture. The paper examines the relationship between these three sources and ways they challenge or inform an understanding of the American society during the late 19th and early 20th century. There is an analysis of the efficiency of the issues tackled by these books in influencing the contemporary discourse surrounding American culture. The major argument of this paper is that Crabgrass Frontier, Manifest Destination and Muscular Christianity provide reliable information about the evolution of the US culture and they supplement each other through the use of relevant examples.