As someone who chased expensive cars throughout my twenties and early thirties, I have spent a large part of my life thinking about the relationship between wealth, status and happiness. In those early days, if you had told me I relied too heavily on luxury, I would have told you no, I just had good taste. I loved the sound of a beautifully made engine, the design, the engineering and the feeling of sitting behind the wheel of something that represented years of craftsmanship. I still do. There is nothing wrong with appreciating beautiful things, and I still believe working hard to enjoy them is something worth celebrating. However, what I would not have admitted then is that those cars were also a way of signalling to the world that I had something other people did not. In turn, the driving force behind that message was a much more painful one: I was paralysed by imposter syndrome, and the cars helped me manage that insecurity.
What was I really buying?
Because of the meaning I had attached to those cars, I became far more invested in wanting them than I realised. I could spend months researching a model, configuring it, reading about it and imagining what it would feel like to own it. In my mind, the purchase was never really about the car. It was about the person I imagined I would become once I had it: more confident, more secure and, ultimately, more worthy. I believed that if I could just have that car, I would finally stop worrying. But when I bought it, the underlying insecurity remained. The car provided excitement and pleasure, but it could not resolve the fear underneath it. Eventually the feeling returned and, almost without noticing, I began looking towards the next purchase. I was not simply buying objects, I was buying imagined versions of myself.
What is the psychology of luxury?
Luxury objects can become psychologically powerful because they can represent far more than their practical function. For instance, a watch can represent achievement, a house can represent security while a car can represent status or belonging. None of this is inherently unhealthy, human beings have always used symbolism to communicate where they believe they belong. The important distinction is whether we are enjoying an object for what it is, or whether we are asking it to change how we feel about ourselves. Buying a beautiful watch because you love watches is very different from buying one because you believe it will finally make you feel successful. Wealth can complicate this further because it can remove the natural limits around desire. When something is difficult to afford, there is time to think, anticipate and reconsider. When money is effectively unlimited, those brakes can disappear.
When does luxury become a problem?
At Paracelsus Recovery, we see the extreme end of this pattern in opulomania, a term we use to describe the compulsive drive towards luxury and acquisition as a way of managing emotional distress. Opulomania is the far end of the spectrum, but the longer I have worked in this field, the more I have come to believe that the spectrum itself is important. Most of us have, at some point, used consumption to influence how we feel. We might buy something after a difficult period because we feel we deserve it, spend money when we are bored or anxious, or upgrade something because we want to feel that we are progressing. None of this automatically represents a problem. But the warning sign is when the object becomes responsible for providing something emotionally that we cannot provide for ourselves. We are using an external stimulus to change our internal state, rather than allowing ourselves to experience and understand what we are actually feeling. The danger is that this can gradually alienate us from ourselves. Instead of dealing with unhappiness, we give ourselves another hit of excitement, status or anticipation. The feeling may disappear temporarily, but the underlying problem remains, and we become increasingly practised at escaping it. This is ultimately what makes compulsive luxury so dangerous. It is not simply that we can spend too much money, it is that we can become dependent on objects to regulate emotions that we have never learned to regulate ourselves.
What can we do about it?
I still appreciate expensive cars, and have no interest in pretending that I have transcended materialism. What has changed is how I respond to wanting. I am less interested in whether I can afford something and more interested in why I want it. If the answer is that I want the object because I genuinely appreciate it, that is one thing. If I recognise that I am reaching for it because I want to feel more successful, secure, attractive or worthy, I try not to immediately act on that feeling. Instead, I try to lean into it, i.e., I allow myself to feel the insecurity or anxiety that I might previously have tried to purchase my way out of. These days, I try to befriend those feelings rather than treating them as problems that need to disappear. For me, that is the healthiest relationship with luxury: not learning to want nothing, but learning that I do not need to buy my way out of how I feel. In doing so, I have found that I can, paradoxically, appreciate luxury far more than ever before.
Source: Khaleej Times