[Or..."the cycle of consumption and dissatisfaction."]

So you get a decent job that lets you afford all your necessities -- food, clothing, living space, and so on -- and a few amenities like going out to the movies and music or wherever your interests happen to be. Eventually you accumulate enough stuff that your current living arrangement starts to feel a bit cramped, or maybe you just want a change of scenery.

So you buy or rent a new and bigger place, and move all of your stuff from the old place into the new one. But the stuff you already have starts to bore you, as stuff long owned tends to do, and you decide you need newer and more expensive stuff. You go out and buy some things, and your finances start to feel a bit stretched. But that's no matter, because soon you get a raise at your job. The raise is significant enough that you feel you can afford a bigger place across town.

So you buy that one, and you move all your stuff there. Then you buy some more stuff to fill out the new place. Eventually you have more than you know what to do with, maybe even more than you would have told yourself you wanted, had you considered the question ten years ago when you got that first decent job. But the funny thing is, you look at all the stuff you own now, maybe books that go unread for months or years, more music than you'll ever practically have time to listen to, the car you bought simply because the last one had started to feel a bit shabby -- you look at all this, and you still want a bit more.

At least a few people reading this will probably think, "Ha! I'm not like that! Once I have x, y, and z, I'll be quite content, thank you very much!" If that is actually the case, then you are a rare person indeed. But chances are that if you think that, you are only fooling yourself, because for most people (and I include myself) our "needs" and our "wants" for material goods are part of the same continuum of forces tugging us along the road to ever-greater consumption in spite of any stories we would like to tell ourselves about how we'd be content if only x, y, and z would happen to us.

I'm not saying that there's necessarily anything wrong with this. I find it kind of amusing, the treadmill that almost everybody is on, the cycle of buying something, taking the thing for granted, and then finally giving in and buying a new thing when the old one has shed too much of its original lustre, only to repeat the process again.