According to his biography Steve Jobs spend years in a house with not much more than a mattress and gramophone as furniture. People have been conditioned to buy

According to his biography Steve Jobs spend years in a house with not much more than a mattress and gramophone as furniture. People have been conditioned to buy stuff as a means of "expressing themselves" or "their personality", the were let towards those kinds of thought with the onset of mass production in the 1920s, at least that's the thesis of "The century of the Self" (http://vimeo.com/85948693 http://vimeo.com/85948693)