Late in Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans live with a kind of restlessness unprecedented by European standards of the day. Driven by the desire for prosperity and comfort, but nevertheless unfulfilled by it, they “clutch everything but hold nothing fast, and so lose grip as they hurry after some new delight.”
Perhaps it’s overdrawn, but there’s something to the stereotype of how Americans of all kinds find themselves drawn into materialistic short-termism. Whether this comes from the pressures of work, or the dreams of what pleasures and joys their money will provide, it’s a tendency with which most Americans seem to struggle, or one they simply embrace.
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