Caring too much for money

At last, someone has invented a personal submarine. Reuters reported Oct. 24 that just such a machine is now on show at London's Science Museum, with inventor Robert Leeds describing it as the world's first underwater sports car. \n"Under the ocean is the last unexplored place on Earth and certainly the last place where there are no personal vehicles," Leeds said. \nWhew. Thank goodness we've finally taken care of that glaring oversight.\nThe machine could be used for research or special forces, but according to Reuters, it's "designed mainly as a plaything for the rich," though you would never have guessed from its $845,000 price tag.\nAdmittedly, a personal submarine is sort of cool. You could use it to admire underwater scenery or to commute to your underwater job. Plus, Leeds had the good sense to make his creation yellow, as all submarines should be, and maybe if you throw in an extra $845,000, he'll even provide a sky of blue and sea of green. \nBut, as clever as this yellow submarine may be, it's also an excellent example of the "created need." What do you do for people who already have a fleet of expensive cars, a private jet and a yacht? You invent a personal submarine to sell them. \n"It is incorrect to say that necessity is the mother of invention. In the rich world, invention is the mother of necessity," George Monbiot wrote in the Guardian last August. "When people already possess all the goods and services they need, growth can be stimulated only by discovering new needs. Advertising creates gaps in our lives in order to fill them. We buy the products, but the gaps remain."\nDespite the prosperity of the developed world, aspiring to still greater material success is both common and accepted. To answer a certain game show's title question, lots of people want to be millionaires. When Ernst & Young polled its college student interns in August 2002, fully 59 percent responded that they expected they would become millionaires in their lifetimes, indicating a confluence of (unrealistically) high hopes and a distinctly material orientation. \nIt stands to reason that one of the forces driving our collective quest for wealth is the desire to spend that wealth on material goods -- to buy clothes, jewelry, mansions, boats and electronic gadgets and on and on. Although we say we know that "money can't buy me love" and that "money can't buy happiness," we sometimes act as if we don't believe it.\nBut it's certainly possible to be happy without being mega-rich or even just plain rich, though one wouldn't recommend pursuing poverty as a strategy for long-term mood improvement. And far from buying us happiness, sometimes our material possessions seem to make us more isolated from each other and more discontent with ourselves. We might fill our lives with money and all the stuff money buys but still feel empty of meaning. In our effort to guard our riches from others, Monbiot suggests, we fence ourselves off in gated communities and watch our big-screen TVs alone. We can't all live in the recently-invented yellow submarine because it only seats three people.\nWhat do we want? Wealth? Possessions? A yellow submarine? Whatever it is that we covet, we might be wise to remember the words of Oscar Wilde: "There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it"