The Frontal Cortex

From Dan Neil, the wittiest writer in the newspaper business:

Desire, the Buddha informs us, is the root of all suffering -- also, a leading cause of alimony, but let's move on.

The craving for comfort, luxury, prestige and me-first acceleration drives us to buy more car than we absolutely need to go from point A to point B. And do these cars -- the Maserati Quattroportes, the Porsche Caymans, the Range Rover Sports -- make us happy? Well, yes. Yes, they do.

But at what cost, karmically speaking? And for how long? I would point people to a common experience: Call it "rental car phenomenology." You go on vacation, rent a chintzy, buzzy little economy car with crank windows, cloth seats and all-but-crystal-set radio, and by the second day you discover, lo, you can get along quite fine with your miserable little scrap of a car. We adjust quickly to our automotive surroundings.

Conversely, the satisfactions of a magnificent Mercedes S-class often seem to decline in direct proportion to the distance from the dealership. After a few months, auto-ennui settles in, and you may ask yourself: Why did I blow all that cash on this boat?

In a material culture running out of ways to besot consumers, I propose a different kind of pleasure: buying less car than you can afford. Maybe a lot less. Cars are, after all, an awful waste of money. For most of their existence all they do is sit there -- in the driveway, the parking deck, on the street -- in a cloud of dissipating residual value. Why not, just for one round in the auto-buying cycle of life, opt out, break the bewitchment of automotive status and indulgence.

I would make one additional point. The virtue of having a bare-boned automobile - as opposed to one of those luxury cars stuffed with multiple computers and useless gizmos - is that there's less stuff to break. After you've adapted to your Mercedes, you cease to take genuine pleasure in its smooth handling or soft leather seats. Yet you are still able to get upset when the "Check Engine" light malfunctions, or the CD changer breaks, or you find yourself continually filling up that hulking V-8 up at the gas station. So even though the car has ceased to make you happy, it can still piss you off. The better psychological move is to pick a reliable, cheap, small car. Might I recommend the Mazda 3?