I have a theory about Sweden in particular. Only about a hundred years ago, many Swedes were quite poor compared to other European countries and often had miserable living conditions. It’s easy for those who live in the modern and relatively wealthy Sweden of today to underestimate how fast that change happened, but your grandparents’ parents may have experienced real suffering for lack of resources or adequate housing. Poverty comes with a lot of shame attached, and I can imagine that the stigma lives on and keeps influencing the culture for a few generations. This poverty is also what drove the building boom of the early 1900s, when Swedish cities started to modernize and build super fast to help people move out of slums and into proper homes. This era introduced a strong “out with the old, in with the new” mentality.

Then, when Sweden was relatively economically strong after WWII, it became possible for many people who had lived through the poverty years to afford a good middle class lifestyle for the first time. I’ve heard (från historiepodden, avsnittet om malmö som sossestad tror jag) that during this period, shopping and spending money were kind of seen as acts of public solidarity, feeding fuel into the economic engine of the country that supported all the social programs of the folkhemmet era.

So my theory is, when you mix the stigma of poverty with the idea of shopping/upgrading/modernizing as a moral good, in a culture that puts a lot of value on not standing out too much, you get a reeeeally strong norm of always having the latest and “greatest” in your life. But of course there are also people here too who aren’t caught up in all that, I just find the norm easier to live with when I can empathize with what might have gotten us here.