Materialistic Chase

I am Ashish Sharma, a 25-year-old commerce graduate working as a salesman in a plastic toys company. I have found that I have no desires for good clothes, movies, eating in a restaurant, having the company of the opposite sex, cars and so on.

I limit myself to reading the newspaper and do not even have an interest in music or books too. All my friends are talking about materialistic possessions and chasing them, however, I do not find that as a need within me. I am not ambitious and am pretty content with what I am doing in my life. However, I often get very frustrated with the comparisons people make in terms of materialistic gains. At that time, I want to avoid people and be comfortable alone. Am I abnormal? What is the psychology behind this kind of attitude? Will I face problems later on?

Your difficulty, Ashish, is in the inability to give an expression to your positive drives of life. Our life is made up of a balance between the positive drives which determine progress and negative drives which are the brakes (sometimes necessary for shaping). The positive drives need to have an object to come into play. Chasing materialistic objects is a very important part of life otherwise the positive drives will accumulate in our mind with no outlet. Chasing materialistic things also provides a focus in life, a goal which is attainable and henceforth contributes to a person’s formation of pride.

It is very important in the formation of an identity. While abstract things are equally important, materialistic things are very necessary for relations between people. It is like a form of communication. It is very important for maintenance of social order too. If not for the materialistic things, it would require a tremendous amount of control on the abstract thinking to be able to move forward. The second reason for your absence of interest in the materialistic things might be to prevent your inferiority from surfacing. It is like a case of “sour grapes”. You might have relinquished these desires from your mind because the chase of these things might point to the inherent difficulties in their acquisition and might bring to the fore your inability to raise your level of living. In order not to face that anxiety and depression, you might be visualizing yourself as not having the drive for materialistic things in life.

The support for that argument comes from the data that if you were truly a saint, then, you would not be angered or frustrated. You would not be up in arms against the general concept of materialistic chase as you know that most people chase materialism in one form or the other. You would have found a niche for yourself and henceforth worked in the areas of life comfortable for you. The third possibility is that you may have been tremendously hurt while chasing a relationship or materialistic possession and henceforth have given up the chase in order to avoid the bitter memories of those events, out of the guilt of having failed in that endeavor and to avoid the helplessness you experience every time you think of that event. It might be an exaggerated reaction to that failure to prevent you from venturing on that path again.

Due to these reasons, you have killed the positive drives within you. As a result, the balance is upset and you end up being possessed by the negative drives. When they do not have any focus on what to act, they tend to make you more and more aggressive on your own self. That would bring us to your questions – is this an abnormality? Yes, it may not be a mental disorder but surely it is a deviation from the routine. Secondly, would it lead to problems – yes, it would because as time passes, the capacity to cope up decreases.

The chase of materialistic things also allows relationships to occur and without the relationships you may find it very difficult to survive in an interdependent society. You may find that you are developing a logic of your own which does not apply to many events and is only to explain away things rather than a responsible logic. This will make you very isolated in life. While you are correct that a blind chase of materialistic things in life may be very improper, a total absence of it is also detrimental.