Ever since the 1950’s, our happiness levels have plunged. Few people know this sad fact is due to the advice of Victor Lebow, a retail analyst who advised the government how to stimulate the economy after WWII. He told the government we needed to become consumers, not creators, and that our identities should be tied to buying things, burning them up and buying more. Is this not our lifestyle today, and is not the media a large contributor to our way of thinking--that the products we buy define not only what we look like, but also who we are? Thus, the media has convinced us that beauty and materialism are essential to joy.

First, the media whips us into a frenzied obsession over how we look. For instance, L’Oreal’s tag line, “Because you’re worth it,” suggests that if we think we are worthy, we would buy their product, and that failing to buy it indicates a lack of self-esteem. It equates spending money on a beauty product with our self-worth, a maxim that has driven people to spend $160 billion a year on beauty, far more than what we spend on education. The media also fabricates unrealistic expectations about the way women should look by bombarding us with fantasy images that are created by a team of artists--the world’s leading hair stylists, makeup artists, photographers, and digital editors, causing plummeting self-esteem, a slew of eating disorders, and burgeoning cosmetic surgery numbers that betray our fascination with our appearance.

In addition to spurring our obsession with beauty, the media fuels our desire for material things. Shows such as VH1’s The Fabulous Life of... glamorize materialism, convincing us that buying things make us happy. In the episode featuring Britney Spears, we learn about the starlet’s lavish lifestyle--how she charters a $500/hour Dassault Falcon private jet to transport her favorite coffee across the country, hires Sonia Rykiel to give her extravagant diamond microdermabrasion facials, and flaunts a $54,000 wardrobe. Music videos are also rife with images of excessive materialism. In one music video, Beyonce crawls toward the camera in a dress constructed of a net of diamonds, a golf-ball sized sparkler in her mouth. Money here is associated with sex appeal, leaving viewers salivating to be beautiful, rich, and “happy,” a lie to which Britney Spears’ meltdown attests. Lastly, we are constantly bombarded by advertisements telling us that the secret to happiness is buying things we don’t really need. Because we make decisions from our emotional limbic brains, not our rational neocortexes, advertisements appeal to our desire to be beautiful, popular, and loved when in truth, all they’re selling us is a tube of lipstick, a bottle of hair dye, and a shirt made in China.

Thus, the media drives us into an unhealthy desire to be as stunning as a Victoria’s Secret model and as rich as a rapper. We weren’t always like this--we used to be a nation of modest immigrants who valued thrift over excess, character over celebrity. In truth, our obsession with beauty and materialism is failing to deliver the happiness we crave.