The Butler Project

Last spring my husband and I were working in our front yard when an acquaintance happened by. We said Hello and chatted for a minute, and then he looked up at our house and said to my husband, “So, Mike, you live here?!”

“Yes,” was the obvious answer, but the question (and my insecurity about it) got me thinking: why was he so surprised Mike lived here? Is our house too big? Is it too small? Is the courtyard too much? Do we have the front lights wrong?

What is it about our house that didn’t match up with what our new friend’s impression of my husband? And why was he judging us based on something as materialistic as our house?

Other peoples’ Stuff

The short answer is: we all do it. We all look at other peoples’ Stuff and make assumptions about who those people are.

Think about how it feels to walk into a business conference where you don’t know anyone. Where do your eyes go? What do you focus on? How do you size up the room? Admit it: within 5 seconds, you have noted first, the gender, ages, and good looks of the other participants, but then your eyes went to watches, jewelry, clothing, brief cases, purses, laptops, planners, whatever people are carrying to this particular gathering. You’ve instantly compared their “Stuff” with your “Stuff” and determined your status, and the status of many in the group, just by looking at and comparing the things you are carrying.

Status

Status is a necessary thing. We all feel a lot more comfortable relating to each other when we know our status in the group. In fact, we humans automatically position ourselves in relation to others, and we’ve been doing it for thousands of years. When our ancestors lived in caves, they positioned themselves under (or tried to become) the alpha male–the best hunter and protector, the one everyone relied on for survival.

We still see that kind of positioning today. When our “survival” is at stake (think “Survivor” or “Lost”), our status in a group is determined by our skills and abilities as they relate to keeping the group alive. But rarely are we in the 21st century concerned with basic survival in our day to day lives. The things we seek, (such as success and happiness) are much less easily defined. So, to position ourselves in a group, we look to material goods: who has the most expensive car, the biggest ring, the largest house, the most toys? The reason we do this is because we want to make instant judgments about our status in a group and material goods offer the easiest measurement.

If you think about it, this is ridiculous, and we are lucky our cave dwelling ancestors were a lot smarter in determining status, or the human race might not still be here. Consider for a moment if our ancestors had chosen to follow the member of their group who found the biggest rock, or the one who could pile dirt the highest. What if the group decided that whoever had the longest hair should be the leader? Those examples sound silly now, but are they any more silly than us determining a person’s status according to the brand of jeans he is wearing or the number of diamonds on her Rolex? Is it not ridiculous to allow Stuff to be the deciding factor as to how we stack up among our fellow humans?

Who spent the most?

Remember, exterior materialistic symbols tell us only who spent the most money. They say nothing of success, happiness, fulfillment, or longevity, all things we say we want. Do you really care who has spent the most money? Do you want to be the person who has spent the most money? No! No one cares who has spent the most. The problem is we make the unconscious assumption that the person who has spent the most money must have the most money to spend, and money, like it or not, is a sign of happiness and success in our culture.

Don’t make that mistake. Don’t burden your psyche with that mistake. In this day of oversize mortgages, home equity lines of credit, skyrocketing credit card debt, and a pay day loan store on every corner, the person who has spent the most money is probably the person with the most debt.

Freedom

You don’t want to measure your worth against someone else’s debt. You don’t even want to measure your worth against someone else’s assets. We all know in our heads that happiness, fulfillment, freedom and peace do not come in a Nordstrom bag. You can’t pick them up at the Mercedes dealership. We need to get that understanding down into our hearts, down where it really matters to who we are. Then, and only then are we each free to pursue the things that really do matter to each of us individually. Then we can measure ourselves as people and not as collectors of Stuff.

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