Will You Ditch The Culture Of Envy?

A look back at how “Keeping up with the Joneses” started.

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful,” said English textile designer William Morris back in 1880. Why didn’t he mention, though, that this shouldn’t apply to your significant other or to whatever the Joneses have in their home? Why?! Oh well, if you ask me, we’re at war. We’re caught in the middle of it, right between the useful and the beautiful. Perhaps people didn’t know it at the time. Yet the moment they invited “beautiful” into their homes, off they went to war. More (beautiful) and Enough (useful) have taken out their big guns and shooting at each other for over 100 years now.

That’s right. It’s been over 100 years since the famous phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” first saw the ink of the print. We’ve been struggling with wanting more when we needed less, ever since. Envy, the product of consumer culture, was a baby back then. But what a big boy it turned into these days!

Curious to know more about how it all started? If so, read some… more!

You can thank Pop Momand for pointing it out

Before Pop, a few others made allusions about people wanting more than they needed and letting others’ preferences dictate their consumer behavior. Nevertheless, it was Pop Momand, an American cartoonist, the one who picked up the trend. He did what any cartoonist knows best — mocked it in a gag-a-day comic strip called… Keeping Up with the Joneses. This comic strip ran from 1913 up until 1940 and inspired a book, a movie, and a musical comedy in the process.

Pop himself was a victim of always wanting more, which probably made him draw the comic book in the first place. He knew fame quite early in life, as he moved to New York when he was only 21 years old and got a “good” job at The New York World. After getting married, the Momands, who were earning quite a lot, decided to lash out and moved to Cedarhurst, one of the fanciest Long Island suburbs. At first, they simply enjoyed the sweet life. Still, it wasn’t long until they got caught up in competing with their neighbors — people who, what do you know, seemed to always be richer and afford more things than they did.

Lucky for them, they got tired of keeping up with the “Joneses” in Cedarhurst. So, they made a massive change and moved back to a modest area of Manhattan. One where their neighbors haven’t heard of the Joneses yet. And where Pop and his wife could have been the Joneses. Anyway, after realizing that sweet life isn’t a piece of cake and moved back to a more sour but still beautiful life, Pop created the comic strip we’re now talking about.

It was harsh, brutally honest, and with a funny touch. All the more reasons to make people fall for it. Keeping up with the Joneses was sold in hundreds of newspapers around the world and kept running for 28 years. Right around that time, other people started to draw attention to this phenomenon.

When envy stops being a sin and becomes the norm

“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s,” says the last of the Ten Commandments. And for hundreds and hundreds of years, people believed in it. Or if they didn’t believe, at least they didn’t show it. But all started to change in the 20th century.

Perhaps people envied less up until that time because they were merely focused on covering their life necessities. As long as they had food, clothes, and shelter, they didn’t look for more. Envy was out of place in times of frugality and thrift. The moment people were being presented with “new fashions”, it comfortably settled in.

Envy and the culture of more took the scene gradually and were all over the place in the beginning. Some people took the plunge from only buying bread and potatoes to a wider range of foods. The average ones were affording to “invest” in iron pots and skillets. In contrast, the very rich ones embraced opulence and purposeful display of richness.

When the Great War ended, there was a richness of resources like never before. In America, for instance, production was 12 times larger than it was 60 years before, but the population only grew to a factor of three (source). In theory, the amount of additional wealth was impressive. In practice, people were stuck in a 7-day workweek with 14 to 16 hours a day. People would have thought Tim Ferris a crazy alien (that’s right, crazy and alien) if they had heard of his 4-hour workweek back then.

The wealth was there, but the buyers were nowhere to be found. Actually, they were to be found in factories, busting their assess off with 100-hour workweeks. For companies to profit from their products, people had to buy them, but who could afford the time to go out shopping? Pay attention to this — afford the time, not the money!

Enter Ford Motor Company and its groundbreaking work policy (not for the sake of the employees, but for the sake of its profits).

On September 25, 1926, something historic happened at the initiative of Henry Ford. His company became one of the first to cut the work volume from 100 hours a week to only 40 hours. His intentions were as capitalist as they could get and many others followed him soon after that.

Here’s how Ford justified the groundbreaking change in an interview from 1926 for the World’s Work magazine: “Leisure is an indispensable ingredient in a growing consumer market because working people need to have enough free time to find uses for consumer products, including automobiles.”

In short, my friends, they sent people home earlier, giving them time to rest and grow the desire to buy things. Buy things not because they needed them, but because the companies producing those things needed to make a profit. They gave people time and struggled to make them envy those who had more.

Popular historian Frederick Allen noted at the time that “Business had learned as never before the importance of the ultimate consumer. Unless he could be persuaded to buy and buy lavishly, the whole stream of six-cylinder cars, super heterodynes, cigarettes, rouge compacts, and electric ice boxes would be dammed up at its outlets.” (source)

The consequence, as Susan J. Matt so beautifully puts it in her book, “Keeping Up with the Joneses — Envy in American Consumer Society” was that “we couldn’t be a nation of consumers until we were given public license to envy”.

Yet the best things in life aren’t things

If anything, the past year taught us that you can have all the things in the world and still not have what you need. Because the best things in life are not things.

Maybe a time will come when we’ll ditch the culture of envy and more, getting back to the culture of enough. I can’t foresee that time, but if Leonardo DaVinci was able to tell nearly 600 years ago that “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”, perhaps there is still hope left for our society to come to this realization.

Meanwhile, we’re all on our own. We all have to fight envy by ourselves and work hard every single day to remind ourselves that we have enough, we are enough.

Thank you for making it to the end! I’ve got more stories like this one if you want to peek: