An Inferior Love

Shopping season has started again. I live at Herald square where the streets are lined with festive stores and on the corner, the famous Christmas windows of the world’s largest store. This year Macy's is playing ‘O Christmas Tree’ nearly 24 hours a day which you can hear with the windows shut on the top floor of my building. Christmas season alone probably accounts for why this street corner is deemed the fourth loudes-on the planet. The sidewalks outside my shop-lined street slow like traffic at rush hour. Never again will I complain about sitting in a climate controlled, adjusted seat car with music and cup holders; standing in traffic is immeasurably worst. Today while I was waiting to cross a street I glanced into a store’s windows at the purses. I know their price tags are well over what I make in a week, but I’m fairly confident that I wouldn’t want one even if my income easily allowed for one. (Somehow I escaped from a family of four daughters without a purse or shoe fetish, which is a rare phenomenon in this corner of the world.)

Augustine, genius of the patristic era, wrote of how “some things are to be enjoyed, others to be used, and there are others which are to be enjoyed and used.” Purses and shoes seem to me to be things I merely use— not things that I find great joy in when I get dressed in the morning. Now, I am not at all implying that luxury items are inherently unnecessary; if your first love is fashion and you live for designer purses, then by all means, delight in high craftsmanship. If your hobby is cars, get one with a good engine and leather interior. Fill your life with things that bring you joy which Augustine noted that we “cling to with love for its own sake.”

A strange trend is happening in America. I sense it in the air at Christmas time and read about it in the newspapers. I feel it surge up in me more often than I admit. All around us are people who have blurred the lines between belongings ‘to be enjoyed,’ and those meant ‘to be used.’ We seek gratification in common useful possessions, such as cars, houses, technology, and clothing. The point at which enjoyment becomes consumerism is when there is no differentiation between items of use and enjoyment. While there is nothing wrong with investing in aesthetics and good things, confusing the useful and the enjoyable goes to extremes very quickly. As though humans were not insatiable enough, this blurring deceives us into thinking that useful items must be upgraded in order to give us increasing satisfaction. There are three compelling reasons why life is more fulfilling when people are aware of the difference between useful material things and those which actually improve their quality of life.

The first is that few people have incomes that allow them to buy everything they can think of to buy. For the rest of the world who have to decide between purchases, being able to identify the option that will bring more pleasure will raise the value of every dollar spent. Material possessions that genuinely raise a person’s quality of life are few, because a person can have but a few passions in life unless they condition themselves to find joy in indiscriminate acquisition. For example, a person who will only be satisfied with a big house, fast car, flashy wardrobe, and extravagant vacations is most likely not an interior designer, car enthusiast, trend-setter, and a lover of new cultures. They have merely conditioned themselves to need the best of everything without really enjoying the possesions. But if you can condition yourself to need things, you can learn to go without them. If a person can learn to only spend their extra money on things that give them genuine delight, they will have more money and enjoyment.

The second reason to differentiate between the good and the useful, is because those things which have the power to give you joy also have the power to take it away. No one needs a life where they are flooded everyday with disappointment over their purse collection or vinyl seat coverings. Walk through the avenues of Manhattan and you may find yourself suddenly very discontented with everything in your possession, right down to your toothbrush holder. There are better thoughts to think than these. This leads into the third reason. The third and most important reason to grow in an awareness of this distinction is because, as Augustine notes, that when we “wish to enjoy those things which should be used, our course will be impeded and sometimes deflected, so that we are retarded in obtaining those things which are to be enjoyed, or even prevented altogether, shackled by an inferior love.” As Americans, we have trained ourselves to value things that once obtained, do not increase our actual quality of life in any way. Why do this, when there are so many more worthy pursuits to strive after? I will leave these crosswalk musings with one final warning from Augustine: “between temporal and eternal things there is this difference: a temporal thing is loved more before we have it, and it begins to grow worthless when we gain it, for it does not satisfy the soul whose true and certain rest is eternity; but the eternal is more ardently loved when it is acquired than when it is merely desired.”