How to Be Less Materialistic (Without Pretending You Don't Like Nice Things)

By Matt Hughes · 2026-07-23 · 8 min read

I never decided to want less stuff — two years of gratitude journalling just made the wanting quieter. The research on materialism explains why.

Most advice on how to be less materialistic starts by telling you to want less, which is about as useful as curing insomnia by telling someone to sleep more. Wanting isn't a tap you can turn off. I know because I have a decade of browser history that is largely me researching things I didn't need, and I still like nice things more than the founder of a gratitude app probably should. So this isn't a minimalism sermon — I own too many pairs of headphones to write one of those with a straight face. It's about something odd I noticed after a couple of years of daily gratitude journalling: I never decided to want less stuff, but the wanting got quieter anyway. When I went looking for whether that was a real effect or just me getting older, it turned out the research has rather a lot to say.

Why do I always want the next thing?

Start with the mechanics of wanting, because they're stranger than they look. In 2013 Marsha Richins, a consumer researcher at the University of Missouri, published a study in the Journal of Consumer Research with a title I've thought about ever since: "When Wanting Is Better than Having." She measured the emotions people felt about a product before and after they bought it. For people high in materialism, the emotional peak came before the purchase. Researching the thing, imagining life with the thing, waiting for the thing to arrive — that was the high. Once they actually owned it, the feeling drained away, reliably. People low in materialism didn't show the same spike and crash.

Her explanation is the part that stung. Highly materialistic buyers aren't really buying headphones or jackets or standing desks — they're buying transformation. The purchase is quietly expected to upgrade not just the desk but the person sitting at it. I recognise this in myself with embarrassing precision. I once spent three separate evenings comparing noise-cancelling headphones while owning a pair that worked perfectly well. What I was actually shopping for, if I'm honest, was the version of me with serene, uninterrupted deep-work mornings — and no pair of headphones has ever shipped with him in the box.

So the thing arrives, fails to transform you, becomes furniture within a fortnight, and the wanting machinery quietly moves on to its next candidate. That's the loop. It isn't a character flaw; it's how anticipation works when it's pointed permanently at the shop window. Which raises the obvious question of whether you can point it somewhere else.

Does gratitude actually make you less materialistic?

Two studies convinced me this wasn't wishful thinking. The first is from Nathaniel Lambert, Frank Fincham and colleagues, published in the Journal of Positive Psychology in 2009 under the refreshingly blunt title "More gratitude, less materialism." In their survey work, more grateful people were reliably less materialistic, and the link ran through life satisfaction: gratitude seems to raise how satisfied you feel with your life as it already is, and people who feel that way have less appetite for acquisition. Then they tested it properly — participants induced to feel grateful came out measurably less materialistic than participants induced to feel envy. I'd never thought of envy as gratitude's opposite before reading that, but as ways of looking at the world they are: one scans for what someone else has, the other for what's already yours.

The second study is my favourite, because it used real money. In 2019, Lan Nguyen Chaplin, Deborah Roedder John, Aric Rindfleisch and Jeffrey Froh studied over nine hundred adolescents — the demographic advertisers work hardest on. Grateful teenagers were less materialistic in the survey data, which you'd expect by now. But in the experimental part, teenagers assigned to keep a gratitude journal became measurably less materialistic than the control group — and when everyone was paid for taking part and offered the chance to donate some of their earnings, the journal keepers gave away sixty per cent more of their own money. Not sixty per cent more agreement with a statement about generosity. Sixty per cent more actual money, out of actual pockets.

Honesty caveats, because I'd want them if I were you: much of this research is on students and teenagers, materialism is measured by self-report scales, and the interventions were short — nobody has followed gratitude journallers for a decade to check whether they buy fewer cars. What the evidence supports is more modest: gratitude and materialism pull in opposite directions, and practising one measurably weakens the other. Modest is still useful. Most things that claim to change your relationship with money can't produce a single behavioural result as clean as that donation finding.

Why would writing down good things change what you want?

Here's the explanation that fits both the research and what I've watched happen in my own journal. Materialism is a rolling audit of what's missing. Gratitude journalling is a deliberate audit of what's here. They are the same mental skill — noticing, appraising, valuing — pointed at opposite ledgers. And attention is finite. Ten minutes a day spent itemising what's already good is ten minutes not spent itemising the gaps, and over months the default direction of the scan starts to shift.

Richins' finding slots straight into this. The high of wanting is borrowed against an imagined future — and as her data shows, the loan gets called in shortly after the courier leaves. Appreciation generates the same warm class of feeling from things that have already survived contact with reality. It's anticipation's quieter cousin, and it doesn't invoice you later.

There's also something specific about writing an entry on a thing you already own. Adaptation means owned things go silent: nobody hears the boiler that works. An entry re-runs the having. The battered laptop I've typed five years of client proposals on got an entry last winter, and for a day or two it stopped being invisible infrastructure and went back to being the good tool it is. That feeling is exactly what the upgrade promises and rarely delivers — and it was sitting in the flat the whole time.

How do you practise it without becoming a monk?

Write about something you already own, roughly once a week. Specifically, not aspirationally. "Grateful for the boots that got resoled and came back better than new" does something "grateful for my stuff" never will. You're deliberately re-running the having-feeling that adaptation switched off. It costs nothing, which is more than can be said for the alternative.

Log the wants as well as the wins. This one I stumbled into. When I catch myself three tabs deep in reviews, I write the want down as a single line with a because: "New desk chair, because apparently I'd sit properly and finally sort my back out." A month later that sentence reads exactly like what it is — a transformation fantasy with lumbar support. Some wants survive the month. Those I buy, without guilt, and they tend to be the ones I'm still glad about a year on.

Count what your entries are actually about. This is the quiet blockbuster. After a couple of years of daily entries, my honest tally is that possessions are a rounding error. Conversations. Work that landed. Food. The weather breaking after a grim week. My own bed after travel. Kansha's pattern analysis will show you this in one glance, but a paper journal and ten minutes with a highlighter delivers the same slightly uncomfortable truth: almost nothing you were glad about was bought. It's hard to keep believing the next purchase will move the needle when hundreds of your own entries testify that the previous ones didn't.

Keep buying things. Genuinely. This is not a no-spend challenge, and the point is not zero purchases — it's purchases made by the person doing the wanting, rather than the wanting doing the purchasing. Deliberate buying of things you'll still value in a year is not materialism. It might even be the opposite: taking objects seriously enough to choose them slowly.

When is "want less" rubbish advice?

Two situations, and they matter. First: if money is genuinely tight, your problem is not materialism. Wanting a working boiler, a winter coat, or one month with some margin in it is not greed, and nobody should be journalling themselves out of wanting those. Telling someone in real scarcity to practise contentment is the toxic-positivity trap wearing a budgeting hat, and I want no part of it.

Second: researchers have long observed that heavy materialism often tracks insecurity — stuff standing in for feeling safe, or loved, or enough. If the shopping has a compulsive edge, or it's running on debt that's compounding while you read this, the kind tool is not a gratitude journal. It's a conversation with someone qualified. In the UK, StepChange and Citizens Advice are free, practical and mercifully unjudgemental, and talking to your GP about the compulsive side is a strength, not an admission.

For everyone else — the ordinarily acquisitive, the review-tab three-evenings crowd, which very much includes me — the practice above is enough to notice a difference within a couple of months. Not a personality transplant. Just a quieter wanting, and a bit more affection for what's already in the room.

I still like nice things. I bought some excellent headphones eventually, and I regret nothing. But two years of entries keep telling me, in my own handwriting, that almost none of the best things were things — and these days I find I believe them.