How much do material things matter?

I have always been a big aesthete. Beauty can really move me and inspire me and I always need a dose of it to feed my soul. That is probably how I ended up studying design, as I was always fascinated with the relationship people have with beauty all around them. However, I’ve realised lately that we have become enslaved to beauty, whether we talk about people or things. With people it manifests thorough this obsession that nothing is ever pretty enough, and with things it manifests through this idea that we never have enough. So I found myself wondering – How much do material things really matter?

Madonna sang about being a material girl in a material world back in 1984, and 30 something years later we are still trapped in the material world. We are now surrounded with so many shops, so many options, so many temptations that it’s not that hard to give in and buy stuff all the time. I am noticing more and more people buying things that they don’t really need, spending a lot of money and not helping out with the environmental issues. It’s easy to get into this magic circle. We have advertisement telling us all the time that we need to have something in order to be cool, happy and stylish. Who doesn’t want to be cool, happy and stylish? The only problem is – no amount of things will make you cool, or stylish and certainly it won’t make you happy. On the other hand, it might make you more fulfilled to think before buying, get the things you need and will really use, and save some money instead of burning it all. I mean nice things are nice, but that is all that they are at the end, just things.