To badly paraphrase Socrates (dialogues.. somewhere) :
"I take great pleasure in looking into shops and realising what I can live without"
Well, I guess I count as a european and it does appear to me that a persons worth in american society is dictated by how much money they have and thus also material possessions. Alas this viewpoint is permeating british society as well but is thankfully not (yet) prevalent. Certainly in britain and other countries I've lived in (germany, italy) there is the sense that what you give back to society is more important that what you take out.
As a random musing, the pointlessness of most peoples jobs was graphically displayed when I visited orkney and discovered that 4000 years ago in order to provide food and shelter for a week the average person needed to work for two days!