Well partially because that's the culture and status game. That's what you see in movies, on TV, everywhere. Success and personal worth equals money, salary, ex

Well partially because that's the culture and status game. That's what you see in movies, on TV, everywhere. Success and personal worth equals money, salary, expensive stuff. Advertisement, marketing, credit cards etc etc. Keeping up with the Joneses, denial about getting old, never sitting down to deeply reflect on their life, being caught in the hamster wheel, the FOMO, etc. Its the same question as why people eat crappy junk food and get obese. Answer 1 is everyone suddenly became stupid and morally corrupt, answer 2 is that their mind is being bombarded with hyperoptimized perfectly honed marketing strategies, carefully designed by very smart people to drive engagement and profits. One needs to adopt a hostile and skeptical attitude to every outside influence reaching you to be able to resist this. Or just shut off a lot of your media consumption, associate with people who value different things etc. But most people won't be able to do this, because once the average person gets ahead of the curve, the marketing machine is already in front of them.