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For millennia, humans have talked about something called the Golden Rule. It's the idea that you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Tim, I think, has discovered something we should call the I-Want-Golden-Things Rule.17 The more you think life is about having stuff and superiority and showing it off, the more unhappy, and the more depressed and anxious, you will be.

you can ask people lots of other questions--and one of them is whether they are unhappy or if they are suffering (or have suffered) from depression or anxiety. Then--as a first step--you see if they match. Tim's first tentative piece of research was to give this survey to 316 students. When the results came back4 and were all calculated out, Tim was struck by the results: materialistic people, who think happiness comes from accumulating stuff and a superior status, had much higher levels of depression and anxiety.

Tim had shown before that materialism correlates strongly with increased depression and anxiety. This experiment showed, for the first time, that it was possible to intervene in people's lives in a way that would significantly reduce their levels of materialism. The people who had gone through this experiment had significantly lower materialism and significantly higher self-esteem. It was a big and measurable effect.

All of us have certain innate needs--to feel connected, to feel valued, to feel secure, to feel we make a difference in the world, to have autonomy, to feel we're good at something. Materialistic people, he believes, are less happy--because they are chasing a way of life that does a bad job15 of meeting these needs. What you really need are connections. But what you are told you need, in our culture, is stuff and a superior status, and in the gap between those two signals--from yourself and from society--depression and anxiety will grow as your real needs go unmet.

Psychologist Tim Kasser stresses that the enrichment of time will lead directly to happiness, while the enrichment of material objects will not.

Meanwhile, we are told that what we buy no longer defines us as it once did, ostentatious materialism is naff, and even the boss of Ikea says we've reached 'peak stuff'. But I am not convinced. All those authentic, social-media-documented 'experiences', insta interiors, travel and food porn invariably require cash. I often wonder how those part-time bloggers/curators earn so much, but they probably don't: they get their enviable lives subsidized by tourist boards or fashion brands that want the advertising.