Spending Less on Material Things Helped Me See What I Truly Value
If only rebooting your mindset was as easy as restarting your laptop. As part of a collection on shifting perspectives, writers share the struggles, revelations, and joys they experienced as they began to see themselves and the world around them from a different point of view—and experts weigh in with advice on how you can change your perspective on just about anything.
When I turned 16, in Memphis, in 1992, I desperately wanted a Jeep Cherokee the color of a martini olive. Specific? Yes. Bratty? Probably. But my dad owned a car leasing business; new cars came and went in our family.
As for the shade, like many Southern teenagers, I’d visited Color Me Beautiful—a service that categorized you as a season, based on your hair and skin tones—and been declared a Fall, someone whose red hair would coordinate nicely with brown sweaters, mustard blouses, and an olive green Jeep.
My dream car wasn’t just a materialistic wish. It was an extension of my identity. In the same way I changed into a turtleneck for my eighth-grade school picture because I thought it was more flattering to my face shape than a T-shirt—even though it was 85 degrees outside—that car was not practical, but poetic. It was meant to say, “I have better taste than the average suburban teenager,” to telegraph who I was and shore up my fragile teenage ego. And that need to project a certain image with our possessions doesn’t always fade with age—just listen to any parent painfully bemoan buying a minivan.
I didn’t get the Jeep. My dad brought home a (taupe!) Honda Accord and taught me to care for it meticulously: vacuum the interior, gauge the tires, take it to the dealership if anything was amiss.
In 2005, I married a man who grew up in New York City, where we still live. To him, cars were not status symbols; they were tools. His family parked theirs on the street, where they were regularly dinged by careening garbage trucks. Once, when I mentioned taking a car to the dealership for a maintenance issue, my in-laws almost choked on their dinner. The dealership?! They had a fix-it guy in Port Chester who took cash.
Over the years, as I have experienced the bumper ping-pong required to get our car into a tight space and, frankly, realized how many things in life I’d prefer to spend my hard-earned money on (babysitters! good gin!), I have moved toward my husband’s mindset concerning cars. We buy used, don’t sweat the dents, and reattach side mirrors with duct tape. We never vacuum. Our trunks have become extra storage for golf clubs or coats that don’t fit in our apartment. New Yorkers find plenty of obnoxious ways to size up their identities, but in a city where the majority of people rely on public transportation, cars are down the list.
Now I see a car as just a means to get from here to there. And letting go of my car fetish has subdued materialism in other areas of my life. A coat is just a preventer of hypothermia during school drop-off in February. A bag is just a means to schlep my laptop without aggravating my middle-aged shoulder. None of mine are remotely fancy. Having had 30 years to discover who I am since the olive green Jeep days, I’m able to see that my identity is rooted in things that don’t need duct tape to stay put: faith, family, maybe even being a New Yorker.
My husband and I now own my dad’s minivan. When we bought it from my mom, after he died in 2019, it was in pristine condition. Now it’s covered in crumbs and trash from our three children. The sunroof is jammed, we’ve already had to replace a side mirror, and the trunk is full of sports equipment. My dad would be horrified. I’m totally at peace.
—Elizabeth Passarella is a magazine writer and author of the essay collection Good Apple.
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