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I am not an accredited sociologist, but I do have an honorary degree from Life College, and I have noticed something: Everyone is born greedy and materialistic, and then the greed and materialism kind of fades away, and then it comes back. It’s like an STD, but it attacks your soul instead of your penis or your vagina.
All babies are born greedy. I’ve noticed this: they always need attention – crying so that someone will hold them, pooping themselves so that somebody will change them, and circulating inexplicable and unfunny “dead baby” jokes so that people will feel bad for them. This is why most of us – those who don’t fall for the dead baby gimmick, anyway – don’t like children under the age of two.
When a baby grows, it turns into a toddler, and toddlers morph into little human beings, and little human beings are the most materialistic animals on the planet. They are even worse than those midget dogs that insist on wearing miniature Cosby sweaters and riding in Louis Vuitton bags.
Once you can speak English, you’ve graduated from baby to toddler. But you can’t graduate from toddler to little human being until you’ve learned to share. Why is sharing such a hard lesson to learn? Because we are genetically programmed to want to possess the coolest stuff, be it a toy dump truck or an iPod Nano, and we are also genetically programmed to want other people not to have what we have. If they have it, your iPod is less cool. That’s why it’s stupid to share.
But sharing is important, if only to fit in, and it’s part of the toddler exit exam (this is perhaps a hold-over from when communism ruled the world in the early fifties). Then again, to graduate from toddlerhood, you’re also supposed to eat your vegetables, know how to piss in a toilet, and subsequently zip up your own fly, which are three things that I rarely remember to do as a twenty-three-year-old, so maybe the toddler exit exam is a completely irrelevant measure of future success.
When I was a five-year-old kindergartner, I went through a show-and-tell phase where I would bring a different piece of hockey equipment to school every day. I started with my helmet and worked my way down the body until I ended at my right skate, and then I didn’t want the gig to be over, so I brought in my left skate the next day, and cycled back through all my equipment, bringing in the elbow pad or shin pad that hadn’t been presented the first time around. After probably a month, I was getting desperate and tried to bring in my jockstrap and cup, but my mom wouldn’t let me, so I had to bring in something completely unmemorable, probably a socially reclusive turtle, instead.
But here’s why I thought bringing in the hockey equipment was so cool – nobody else had it. Nobody else played hockey, so having an ice skate in your backpack was as novel (and probably as dangerous) as carrying around a jewel-encrusted samurai sword. Show-and-tell time was an open forum to say, “I own this ice skate, and you don’t, so shove it,” but not literally, because that would probably cause a lot of bleeding.
Eventually we do learn to share, and we learn not to worry too much about the material world, unless you’re a material girl, in which case you probably spend too much time at outdoor malls wearing oversized black sunglasses, or a material guy, in which case you probably pop the collar on your leisure blazer.
For me, the apex of my flight away from materialism was college, where for four years I purchased only three kinds of clothing – boxers, socks, and a new pair of jeans every six months when my crotch ripped out. I also bought a rainbow-colored windbreaker once, but that was for an eighties party, so I don’t think it counts.
I didn’t buy new clothes because I didn’t have any money, but none of my friends had money either. We were all playing on a level field. Sure, there were some kids who felt it was really important to wear pastel Lacoste polo shirts, but since everyone just assumed that their parents had paid for the shirts, there was no reason to be jealous. And the polos were pastel. That was another reason not to be jealous.
Everything was paid for in college – classes, books, food at the Student Union, even the four-bedroom house you shared with Johnny, The Bobster, Sully, and the random guy from Sully’s hometown who crashed on the couch for the entirety of winter ‘04. Money doesn’t really exist in college because everything goes on a magical ID card, the one the school gave you when you were a freshman and nervous and awestruck and still in possession of your V-card.
Obviously, a lot of students live with the promise of future debt, but with a college loan comes the potential to make money, tons of money, and since all of your friends are basically borrowing money from their parents, you’re all in the same boat. (It’s only later, when you find out how much you owe, that you realize you should have been worried about the money.)
The only financial issue most college students face is whether to go with the keg of PBR for fifty bucks or the Bud Light for seventy, and usually you went with the PBR to leave enough cash for pizza at two in the morning, which meant that the next day your entire house was in line waiting to use the toilet while Sully’s buddy from home turned the bathroom into a Superfund site.
But whatever. At least everything was cheap.
Materialism exists less in college, at least from what I saw, because nobody really has any money of their own, but there’s no reason to worry about money because everyone has enough. Or something. It’s those magic ID cards.
After I graduated from college I was still in that mindset. Shortly after commencement I went on a cruise with my grandfather to celebrate his eightieth birthday and every night at dinner he asked me if I had a suit and every night I would tell him that the answer was still no and he would ask me why I didn’t own a suit and I would say there was no reason for me to have one and he would say that every man should own a suit.
I didn’t get it. Clothes, as I saw things, served very little function other than keeping me warm in the winter or keeping me un-naked in the summer. And suits were completely impractical for both seasons because they weren’t warm enough for the cold weather, and they made me too un-naked in the warm weather. Design a down suit or a suit that consists of shorts and a vest, and maybe I’ll wear it.
But perhaps my fashion philosophy is starting to bend. A few days ago I was sitting in a meeting at my advertising agency, listening to a man who was wearing a well-tailored black shirt, expensive-looking slacks, and shiny black shoes, and I was like, Hey, that guy is wearing nice clothes. Maybe I should start wearing nice clothes. And then I was like, Hey, that was out of character. And then I was like, Maybe I’m becoming metro, but then I laughed because there’s no way I would ever be metro, but then I stopped laughing because everyone in the meeting was staring at me, wondering why I was giggling.
Now that I’m out of school and making a little money, I have to make decisions about how to spend it. Everyday, I could decide to:
A) Save my money for something useful, like a new computer
B) Treat myself to a nice dinner, or
C) Blow all my savings on drugs, prostitutes, and night-vision goggles
Lately I’ve been choosing option A, but the point is that I don’t have to choose option A, and by the time you read this, the possibility exists that I could be re-creating a scene from Scarface with a couple girls from Chinatown, at night, with everything in black and green.
And my friends all face the same decision. Most of them make even more money than I do because they work in the financial world, which I guess would allow them to buy seven girls from Chinatown, extra sets of night-vision goggles, and maybe like a laser tag set or something.
This difference in income, for the first time in our lives, stratifies us.
We think about how much money we have now. There was no reason to do this when we were in college. I begin wondering if life would be better off if I were an investment banker and had loads of money, and they begin wondering if they would be better off being a writer with no money because then they wouldn’t be working a hundred hours a week. The solution is to become a successful writer, but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.
Now that we’re all out on our own, cut off from the financial umbilical cord, the subject of money is unavoidable. Sometimes I worry that I’m reverting back to the way I was when I was little, when I wanted things, and when I wanted people to know I had those things.
I was greedy and materialistic then. I don’t want to go back.
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adam@theadamwhite.com |
