Snobbery and indifference to stuff, or my love-hate relationship with the idea of buying pants at Lululemon

Is dislike of stuff - of shopping, of material objects - an admirable quality? Is liking stuff evidence that one is a bad person? Or is there more to it?

Graham Hill's account of having gobs of money but choosing to live with less helped me put my finger on what it is about the 'we have too much stuff' line of thought that can be so frustrating. Hill insists, and insists some more, that he's unusual for having had so much to begin with (tech-boom something-or-other), but that his lessons apply to regular-folk as well. And, well, yes and no.

First the yes: There's no point disputing that stuff tends to be bad for the environment, and to have been produced in unsavory conditions. Stuff plainly does not matter more than people. If, in a fire, you'd save your stuff and not your family, you have a screw loose.

But is the difference between the pro- and anti-stuff contingent really that the latter set care, while the former set are ego-driven and oblivious?

There are multiple reasons someone might join the anti-stuff bandwagon. Some people really are just hippies, and would rather meander in the wilderness than deal with the hustle and bustle of the mall. Others wish they could afford the $90 Lululemon yoga pants,* realize that they cannot (or can't get those and also buy cheese and, well, priorities), and then are all, screw Lululemon with its $90 yoga pants. Or: they think of all the amazing things they'd do with $90 (save the world, spend it on experiences, and/or buy even more cheese) and can't believe those with $90 to spare waste it on leggings.

Or - and here's the one we tend to forget about - there are those who could totally afford $90 yoga pants, but who are so secure in the knowledge that they could do so that $90 leggings don't feel special. If you don't have the concept of needing to save up for anything, you can afford, as it were, to be less materialistic. Status items lose their appeal if you already have whichever status. Result: they're associated with strivers. It's a form of status to have whichever handbag, but a still-greater form to not get one.

Now, this doesn't mean that everyone who doesn't own an Hermes (i.e. nearly everybody on the planet) stands accused of not owning one because they think they're too old-money or intellectual for something so obvious. Most of us can't buy the thing in the first place! It means that non-ownership of name-brand stuff - when it could be afforded, or when it's presented in a certain way - can have that meaning.

This came up in my post on weddings - that opposition to the big blow-out wedding seems very anti-one-percent, but is often snobbishness of a different kind. Spending up on a wedding seems low-class, crass, and McMansion-ish. Does this mean that everyone should have a conventional and expensive wedding, perhaps going into debt, in order to demonstrate non-snobbery? No. (Which I should have spelled out - many readers seemed to come away thinking this was my point.) But it means that we shouldn't have such a simplistic take on what snobbery entails. It isn't just the contests over who has the biggest wedding/ring. It's also the ones over who best demonstrated their distance from the bourgeois, mass-culture norm.

We kind of understand this when it comes to poverty (as opposed to middle-class-ness) and food (as opposed to stuff-more-generally). The whole lentil argument - why don't poor people eat more lentils? (Insert whichever observations re: buying in bulk.) And the requisite-if-oversimplified answer is, because the only treat available to them is fast food. But we really don't when it comes to status-seeking among the not-impoverished. Some commenters do, but on the whole, most who discuss this topic don't. To understand doesn't mean to celebrate, or to be all relativistic and say that there's no ethical problem with wastefulness. There just needs to be a better way of urging less-stuff, one that acknowledges why some care for stuff more than others.

There's a gender component as well - yes, men and their gadgets, but on the whole, materialism is associated with femininity. With men earning and women spending. Spending largely on their own upkeep, but also on decorating their houses. Conversely, getting rid of all your stuff - especially doing so to travel the world with "an Andorran beauty" named Olga - is a kind of classic macho fantasy. (Is it OK to write about women in this manner in the New York Times opinion section if you seem to be coming from the left?) I suppose the appeal of this article was partly that Hill acknowledged the male capacity to accumulate stuff. Too often, 'stuff' is equated with stuff women use to look pretty and save time on housework, when of course women should be naturally pretty and slim from all that vacuuming.

*Lululemon might be the clothing store closest to where I live. It taunts me, saying, 'Do you really think those Old Navy lounge pants, those Target sweatpants, do you any favors?' I tell it, 'But I just bought new jeans a few weeks ago, and finally, in friggin' March, got around to buying a proper winter coat (there's still snow, and it was of course now on sale). I'm not about to spend $90 on leggings.' Do you think it cares? It responds, 'But these pants, which you've never even tried on, would be amazing, so amazing as to inspire you to work out more often.' I tell it that I've tried this before, albeit with much cheaper workout wear, and it sits in the workout-wear drawer, the fantasy of going through that many workout outfits (five?) in one laundry cycle still unrealized.' And so it goes.