Comparison

It's pretty hard to deny that most of us nowadays are pretty materialistic. We are hung up on how much we earn, what car we drive, what handphone we use, where we dine, what we wear, etc etc etc.

Now people often speak words of wisdom against this materialism, e.g.

"In the old days we didn't have much, we wore old clothes handed down from our elder siblings and played with sticks and stones. Nowadays kids want expensive electronic toys. So greedy!"

Or

"Primitive tribes in Africa have nothing and yet are happy! Why can't we be happy with less?"

The answer to this is that if everyone of us suddenly had less material goods, for instance if we all suddenly reverted to using the venerable Nokia 3310, also affectionately know as "The Brick", that would not make much impact to the general level of happiness. But if YOU were forced to use it, and everyone laughed at you because of it, that would affect YOUR level of happiness.

In other words, what affects our level of happiness is not the absolute level of our material enjoyment, but that in respect to others around us.

So our parents were happy with sticks and stones in the kampung when they were kids, but if I were to open a space-time portal and give one kid a PS3, I bet all the other kids would instantly feel dissatisfied with their sticks and stones.

And although our expensive cars may make no impact to the happiness of African tribespeople in the wild, I bet their warriors are concerned whether they have less ostrich feathers in their headdress than their peers or not.

Therefore, if you ask me "would you mind making do with less," I would say:

"Sure, but everyone else has to make do with less as well."