While it is easy to look at those who splash money around on flashy gear and beach houses and think life is good for them – researchers have actually found an association between materialism and decreased well-being.
This recent article on Huff Post’s The Third Metric: Redefining Success Beyond Power and Money explains why more things don’t make us happier.
“It’s no secret that gratitude makes us happier, while materialism can do the opposite. And now, a new study shows that lower levels of gratitude could be part of the reason for why materialistic people have decreased life satisfaction, and that gratitude could actually mediate the relationship between materialism and life satisfaction.
“As we amass more and more possessions, we don’t get any happier – we simply raise our reference point,” said researcher James Roberts from Hankamer School of Business at Baylor University. “That new 2,500-square-foot house becomes the baseline for your desires for an even bigger house. It’s called the Treadmill of Consumption. We continue to purchase more and more stuff but we don’t get any closer to happiness, we simply speed up the treadmill.” Read more about this research here.
We know from Shrink that Footprint Australians have the biggest houses in the world. That aside, there were plenty of Brisbane residents at yesterday’s Green Heart Fair interested in ways they can reduce their consumption and live more sustainably and it was great to be amongst them.
Sew 153 is an eco-dye project which started by using a spray bottle to apply milk to a number of old white t-shirts and leaving them to dry in the shade. The splotches in the t-shirt are where the milk was because its protein helps absorb the colour. One t-shirt was dyed using a cold process, putting fallen maple leaves in dilute vinegar (about 1:4) for a few days, then wrapping the t-shirt in the leaves and leaving for another few days before drying and rinsing. The other dye process was using bark soaked in dilute vinegar then boiled for a short time and left to cool overnight before rinsing. The cold process using leaves actually generated the darker-coloured t-shirt, from which I trimmed the arms. I turned the hot-dyed t-shirt into a skirt during a few spare moments at the fair yesterday, trimming the upper part of the shirt into the shape of a skirt (forgot to photograph that sorry), then hand-stitching the side seams together and hand-stitching elastic in place to form the waistband.
