We Are What We Consume Consumption Culture and Teen Identity, Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed the nature of consumer culture and its high level of adolescent involvement.  Consumer culture, particularly brands, can be a powerful tool utilized by adolescents in the process of forming and projecting their identity.  In Part 2 we will discuss the impact of this method of identity formation on adolescents.

Fads come and go.  What was once cool is no longer. Even the coolness of the word “cool” is relative; words like “sweet”, “hip”, or now “deck” replace what was “so last year” or even “so five minutes ago.”

A close attention to brands and fads causes many U.S. adolescents to be intuitive “status-ticians”.¹  Kids have an insatiable thirst for knowledge about things that they perceive as socially acceptable.  They also have a remarkable ability to catalogue which products will display particular traits, tastes, and skills most effectively to their peers, based on ever-fluctuating trends.

Status Hungry

Brands say a lot about status, but interestingly it is not the branded product itself that confers the status.  That’s why possessions or objects are called ‘status symbols’.  The item can only communicate status.  Status is actually conferred by other people.  When kids allow their status to reside solely in the minds of others through a reliance on brands, appearance becomes the core way kids measure their value and self-worth.²

Developmentally, adolescents tend to be influenced by traits that are easiest to assess.  According to psychologists, the two easiest traits to assess are physical attractiveness and status among peers.³  As a result, kids tend to acquire objects and possessions which clearly communicate things about their physical appearance and their status.  This explains why kids place such a high emphasis on clothes and electronic gadgets: clothes communicate concerning physical status and electronic gadgets, given their cost communicate economic status. The result is that the consumption of trait-communicating products promotes two significant lies, according to psychologist Geoffrey Miller: “one is that above-average products can compensate for below-average traits when one is trying to build serious long-term relationships…a second big lie…is that products offer cooler, more impressive ways to display our desirable traits than any natural behavior could provide.”⁴

The Dangers of Status-Based Identity

An over-reliance on brands and products to communicate personal traits and an emphasis on appearance can create dangerous hopes and dreams for adolescents.  As John De Graff notes,  “We keep looking outside ourselves for satisfactions that can only come from within…happiness comes from achieving intrinsic goals like giving and receiving love…people with extrinsic goals sharpen their egos to conquer outer space, but they don’t have a clue how to navigate inner space.”⁵

Fame & Fortune?

The predominance of “reality” TV, the popularity of YouTube and websites like “The Fail Blog” seem to confirm the constant search and striving for wealth, fame and notoriety in our culture.  Countless times reality show contestants, a significant number of whom are under the age of 18, can be heard saying during their audition on American Idol or America’s Got Talent that this is the biggest moment of their lives or that their dream is to be famous.  They stand before a panel of judges waiting to be deemed worthy by the conferring of a new status. Sadly, only an extremely small percentage of those contestants receive the affirmation they are looking for.

Materialism = Risky Business

Kids who rely on the acquisition and display of material goods and brands to communicate their identity often find happiness elusive. In numerous studies of high school and college students, psychology researchers and professors Ryan and Kasser have found that individuals with materialistic or consumer-driven values reported decreased self-actualization and vitality and increased depression.⁶

Just as “yesterday’s luxuries have become today’s necessities,”⁷  yesterday’s disturbed is the new normal.  Kids between the ages of nine and seventeen typically score as high on anxiety scales as children and adolescents who were admitted to clinics for psychiatric disorders in 1957.⁸  While it has not been proven that this is the direct result of increased consumeristic tendencies, a growing number of authors are noting the potential correlation.

In another study, 261 students revealed a direct correlation between strong materialistic and consumeristic value orientations and an increase of the likelihood of frequent substance abuse.⁹  As youth leaders and parents, this is a sobering reminder that an over-reliance on material possessions as a means of communicating identity and as a channel for affirmation could be a gateway to emotional instability and risky behavior.

Kid/Parent Relationships

In addition to having a direct negative impact on teenagers’ happiness and quality of life, an emphasis on materialism and consumerism can have a significant impact on their relationship with their parents.  Numerous studies have found that a higher degree of consumer involvement by adolescents usually results in a decline in the quality of relationships with parents.¹⁰  This usually occurs because people experience a void in deep meaningful relationships in their family and in their extended communities when they focus on the possessions they have and the status that is accorded to them.¹¹  As kids grow accustomed to having and gaining material possessions, they place pressure on their parents or guardians for even more material possessions, further exacerbating the strain on already fragile relationships.

Pride, Vanity and Narcissism

Researchers have also found that there is a direct correlation between materialism and narcissism.¹²  So the more kids feed into the consumer mentality, the more their gaze focuses inward in unhealthy ways.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal provides some intriguing and alarming insights into the correlation between brands, material possessions and narcissism.  Talent, wealth and looks have been for some time the primary means for gaining status.  However, that list is being revised with new twists.  A growing number of young people are using social media to build their ‘personal brands’ and to increase their ‘PeerIndex’ score, which according to the WSJ is the “S&P of social relationships”.¹³   The idea is to manage your Facebook status updates and tweets in a way that solicits maximum feedback and responses from friends and followers that then increases one’s influence score.

Ultimately, social media is simply providing one more way for individuals to seek to elevate themselves in the eyes of their peers at the price of seeing their peers decrease in social status.  In this case however, the difference is that the use of electronic social media is increasing the rate of change in one’s social standing.  This makes both the rewards and costs of narcissism practically instantaneous.

Forever Young?

Because adolescents consume primarily for the purpose of developing a status-based identity, a final negative impact is that it contributes to the lengthening of adolescence.  Materialism and capitalism have “… altered the ontology and political economy of adulthood, creating new forms of identity (loss) and (im)maturity.”¹⁴  Schor, professor of Sociology at Boston University, argues that as a nation we place more priority on teaching our adolescents and children how to consume than we do on teaching them how to thrive socially, intellectually and even spiritually.¹⁵

Implications for Youth Ministry

These studies highlight the precarious and vulnerable position of consumer-based adolescent identity formation in our culture.  The good news is that kids do want to be known to others and be affirmed by others.  These studies also confirm to youth workers what we already know from scripture: forming, projecting and communicating your identity through brands and possessions does not lead to wholeness, but instead leads to disconnectedness from others and a profound sense of incompleteness.

We all work with broken and hurting kids.  Helping kids name the causes of their struggles can be part of the healing process. Below are some questions to tackle in your own ministry context:

• What objects and possessions convey significant status upon adolescents in your community?  What brands do you hear or see that confer particular status on kids?
• How would you rate kids’ anxiety levels when it comes to having or displaying particular brands or products?
• In the article a correlation between adolescent consumer tendencies and the quality of parental/child relationships was noted.  Do you see evidence of this correlation in your community?  As church communities, what can we do to help families identify this relationship in their lives and to respond to it?

1. Geoffrey Miller, Spent: Sex, Evolution and the Secrets of Consumerism (London: William Heinemann, 2009), 14. [↩]
2. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 200. [↩]
3. Miller, 81. [↩]
4. IBID., 84-85. [↩]
5. John De Graff, David Wann, and Thomas H. Naylor, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2005), 115. [↩]
6. Tim Kasser, The High Price of Materialism (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002), 11. [↩]
7. Tom W. Sine, Jr., “Globalization, Creation of Global Culture of Consumption and the Impact on the Church and its Mission,” ERT 27:4 (2003), 259. [↩]
8. Juliet B. Schor, Born To Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (New York: Scribner, 2004), 13. [↩]
9. Tim Kasser & Richard M. Ryan, “Be careful what you wish for: Optimal functioning and the relative attainment of intrinsic and external goals,” in Life goals and well-being: Towards a positive psychology of human striving, eds. P. Schmuck & K.M. Sheldon (Goettingen: Hogrefe & Huber, 2001), 116-131. [↩]
10. Schor, 170. [↩]
11. Kasser, 61. [↩]
12. Kasser, 12. [↩]
13. see “Wannabe Cool Kids Aim to Game the Web’s New Social Scorekeepers,” Wall Street Journal. [↩]
14. James Cote, Arrested Adulthood: The Changing Nature of Maturity and Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 77. [↩]
15. Schor, 13. [↩]

©2011 Fuller Youth Institute