At age 35, with two and a half children, we were the exact median of post graduate student families living in grad housing. We had a two bedroom apartment with a common area and a small galley kitchen. We had no income, only our savings. It was a wonderful life. All of our neighbours were in the same boat so we never felt deprived. My husband loved his studies, I loved homeschooling our children. We played pioneers. We all embraced this stage of our life.

My neighbour told me that she felt terribly guilty about forcing her four small kids to live in an 800 square foot apartment. The three boys got the bedroom, the daughter's room was the walk-in closet. Then one day my friend revisited her childhood home where she and all her siblings had grown up, happy and healthy. It was 800 square feet.

In the days before mass media, a person’s expectations came from their physical surroundings. In a village, they saw the kind of home they would have one day and the kind of lifestyle they could expect. When they got old enough to work, they started to save some money, eventually bought a little cottage and began their own lifestyle, just like everyone else. And they expected to work up to it, not immediately have all the conveniences it took their parents twenty years of hard work to achieve.

We still set our expectations by our peer group, but our peer group has changed. The houses we are most familiar with now are not the ones in our neighbourhood, but the ones on television and in the magazines. We no longer expect to live humbly. We expect to live the way our new peer group does. And if we don't, we somehow feel diminished or inadequate.

There is another powerful tide pulling at us. We live in a consumer society. We are bombarded with artificial standards created by those trying to sell us their products. Consumerism survives by advertising. Advertising strives to make us, the consumers, equate material goods with quality of life. If all the stuff money will buy equals happiness, then we're not happy yet because we don't have all the stuff.

No matter how much money we get, there are still more things to spend that money on. How can we possibly be happy when we don't yet have  ________________ [ fill in the blank ].

Why are the styles in clothing, leisure activity gear, vehicles, interior design and home building always changing? The carrot of false happiness is dangling in front of my nose, but I can never quite reach it. And I never will, because they keep moving the carrot. "Out of date" "old fashioned" "not on trend." What do these phrases really mean? Who decides on such artificial standards? Could it be the sellers of goods? The ones who must make you dissatisfied with what you have so you will buy something more?

Everyone who is selling you dissatisfaction is working
for their own selfish ends. ~ Seth Godin

The good news is that we can break away. We can refuse to be manipulated by artificial standards. It's a quiet revolution and an exciting personal journey as we examine our real needs and discover how we can meet those needs in creative and satisfying ways that don't necessarily require money.

Time to Think It Over

Am I letting others define my needs? Can I tell the difference between my needs and my wants?

Use these questions to discover ways you might be, or might have been, manipulated into spending money when it could have been avoided. This is a good activity for a family to do together. Make a game of it. You're the detectives working to uncover a sneaky plot. Track down all the clues you can find.

Worksheet Questions

1. Brainstorm a list of at least five things you spent money on that have built-in obsolescence.
   Definition: Products designed to fail or break – appliances with non-replaceable parts or digital devices that can no longer be updated.

2. Brainstorm a list of clothing, shoes, sports gear or accessories that you became dissatisfied with only because they are out of style.
   Definition: "Out", "Dated", "Dead", "Over"

3. Brainstorm a list of puchases you didn't (or don't) really need but could be made to want because you were (are) influenced by advertising.
   Definition of induced demand: when advertising creates a "need" for a product that didn't exist before.