MATERIALISM.

Anti-materialists say that the happiness got from material things is bad. Where the material things they mean are things like clothes, shoes, cars, furniture, electronic gadgets. And that it’s better to get your happiness from non-material sources such as human relationships.

But all the reasons for thinking that happiness got from material things is bad apply just as much to the happiness got from non-material sources. For example when we get our happiness from shiny new toys we eventually become bored and then have to get different shiny toys. This is all bad. But the same applies when we get our happiness from our shiny new friends. In general happiness from non-material sources can be just as fleeting, mutable, transient, addictive, distracting, overpowering, insidious and unreliable as happiness from material things. You could obsessively pursue spiritual and artistic experiences. You might always be travelling longer and longer distances to see new and more beautiful landscapes of nature. And probably the one single source of happiness that is the most unstable (and therefore more likely to yield unhappiness than happiness) is personal romantic relationships.

Isn’t this equivalence of happiness from material and non-material sources due to the fact that you can’t make a distinction between material and non-material sources in the first place. Consider the following desires, are they materialistic or not? To be popular and famous, to be loved, to enjoy works of art and the beauties of nature, to want to have knowledge of the world (for its own sake).

Another reason you can’t make the distinction is because a lot of the desires we have for material things are often (maybe always) a disguised desire for non-material things. I mean things like the admiration, attention and affection of other people. And the feeling of belonging to some group. And then the acquisition of material goods is often just a means to those non-material ends. For example I might buy and wear certain clothes to be liked by my peers. About this the anti-materialists would say that owning material things doesn’t get you the admiration of other people. But I think they might be wrong about this.

Sometimes anti-materialists are just being snobbish. If someone is getting their happiness from the car the own. The anti-materialist will say that that happiness is not as good as the happiness got from discussing poetry. But that's no argument. It’s just an expression of personal taste.