Keeping Up and Burning Out, An American Story
There was a very popular t-shirt in the 1980s that read: He who dies with the most toys, wins. You saw it everywhere, in malls, in magazines, in parking lots across America. It was meant as a joke, but it wasn’t really a joke.
It was a cultural mantra.
A message about what matters most in life: not wisdom, not kindness, not joy, but accumulation.
Stuff.
Toys. Boats, cars, big houses, expensive shoes, glittering jewelry.
This is what passes as achievement in American culture. And if you ask me whether this culture promotes happiness, the answer is obvious.
It doesn’t.
It does the opposite.
Everyone knows — and research makes it plain — that stuff doesn’t bring lasting happiness. Money matters only up to a point: enough to pay the bills, keep a roof overhead, drive a car that won’t break down, cover health insurance, and keep the wolves of stress at bay. Beyond that, piling up more doesn’t make you any happier.
Kahneman and Deaton put the number at $75,000 a year back in 2010.
More recent studies nudge the threshold higher, but the story doesn’t change: once your needs are met, more income buys only diminishing returns. Yet the culture barrels ahead as if happiness lay just one promotion or one Amazon delivery away.
Worse, it teaches us to compete rather than connect.
Keeping up with the Joneses isn’t a sideshow; it’s the main event.
If the neighbors install a pool, you’d better dig one too. If they go to Disneyland, you’d better book Cabo. If their kid goes to Princeton, your kid had better land Harvard. Life is framed as a tournament of one-upmanship, where being the Big Man on Campus, or the block, or the office — is the only measure of worth.
Happiness doesn’t stand a chance in this environment.
The cultural snapshots are everywhere.
Think about Black Friday, when people literally trample each other at Walmart for a cheap flatscreen hours after giving thanks for what they already have. Think about Instagram, where vacations aren’t about experience or rest but about staging the perfect photo of feet in front of turquoise water. Think about McMansion neighborhoods where 2,000 square feet is suddenly “not enough” once someone else builds 4,000.
These aren’t fringe cases; they are the American story.
And none of it has to do with flourishing as human beings.
None of it is about building resilience, cultivating wisdom, or sustaining deep relationships.
So why does the culture work this way?
The answer is self-interest, not yours, not mine, but the self-interest of the few at the top. A restless, unsatisfied, perpetually competing population is a profitable one.
If people believed they had enough, the endless churn of productivity and consumption would stall. Better to keep everyone scrambling for more, distracted by the neighbor’s pool, chasing a happiness that always slips just out of reach.
It’s not an accident that the culture obstructs happiness; it’s by design.
Maybe Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign slogan — “It’s the economy, stupid” — got at part of the truth. A functioning society does require basic economic stability; people can’t flourish if they can’t pay rent or keep the lights on.
But America twisted that insight into something else: the belief that endless economic growth equals happiness. That if some money is good, more money must be better, and still more must be best.
Yet we know it isn’t true.
If you’re rich and miserable, more money won’t help. The culture just prefers not to admit it.
Maybe that old t-shirt was more honest than we thought.
He who dies with the most toys, wins.
The joke is that nobody wins.
Not really.
The thrill fades, the comparison never ends, the hunger only grows.
And while America loves to preach freedom and potential, those values get swallowed up by the marketplace and sold back to us as slogans for sneakers or SUVs.
The truth is simpler and harsher: American culture doesn’t want you happy.
It wants you consuming.
It wants you on an endless treadmill of material consumption. It wants you restless and frustrated and unhappy.
It wants you distracted.
It wants you competing.
It wants you broke and buying.
It wants you chained to the grind.
Until we start questioning this design, we’ll keep mistaking the chase for the prize, and wonder why happiness always seems just out of reach.
