Joanna Blythman on material greed

IT brought a tear to my eye, really it did, listening to Heather Mills's impassioned plea for financial justice on behalf of poor little Beatrice. Five years old, and already at the workhouse door because she only has a hopelessly inadequate £35,000-a-year to live on. Just imagine the terrible hardship, not to mention psychological trauma that will be inflicted on the poor little mite. There's Daddy, riding up front in first class, nibbling on canapés and sipping champagne, and then there's Beatrice, roughing it back in refugee class, queueing for the lavatory, ankle-deep in a sea of discarded Pringles and UHT orange juice cartons.

Mills's belligerent advocacy on her daughter's behalf was a bravura performance, if brash, staggeringly unaware, insensitive and most definitely, self-wounding. Just like Marie Antoinette before her, Mills is a one-woman walking PR disaster whose limited skills of anticipation and skewed view of how she comes across to others have led her to misjudge her audience in a monumental way. You wonder if Paul McCartney actually needed the services of his excellent lawyer, Fiona Shackleton. With an ex-wife like Mills, you only need to wind her up and let her mouth off, and every judge on the planet is automatically on your side.

Greedy? Thick? Mad? Theories abound as to what, exactly, makes Mills tick. It's easy to dismiss her as a grasping Walter Mitty-style fantasist, but in her aspirations, is she really so radically different from lots of us? True, playing the poverty card was heavy-handed, a characteristic miscalculation of epic scale. But if you got Mills in a quiet room and asked her why, oh why she expected us to empathise with her, she might just say that she was only expressing sentiments shared by our increasingly affluent society. Haven't we all got the right to be rich? Don't we all yearn to buy our way out of that "B-class life"?

Mills's remarks certainly lacked a sense of proportion, but they are more in tune with contemporary aspirations than we like to think. Aren't we all a bit stuck on a ladder that leads to ever more material attainment, one that has disappointment and fear of failure build into it? Disappointment, because we are never happy with what we've got. Like children at Christmas, we are bored with our presents. No sooner have we ripped off the wrappers than we are striving for bigger and better ones. Fear, because we fret that not having all the outward trappings of wealth consigns us to a miserable existence as a member of some pariah class.

Nowadays, it's not good enough to just have a nice holiday, it has to be the holiday of a lifetime. Jeans won't do any longer, we need "designer" jeans. No wedding is worth contemplating unless it costs upwards of £10,000. Anything that is cheap, serviceable and durable is unglamorous. Phones, TVs, stereo players, Walkmen our homes are scrapyards of gizmos and redundant technology that has been surpassed by newer and better "must-haves" that feed our feeling of self worth.

Mills could do with reading the new book by John Naish called Enough. Naish believes that we are locked into a cycle of infinite consumption in a culture that has one overriding message - we do not yet have all we need to be satisfied. "The answer, we are told, is to have, see, be and do more. Always more", he writes. But this ever-expanding world of new wants is bearing strange fruit: stress, depression and burnout are all rising fast, even though we live amid unprecedented abundance. His solution to this conundrum? All of us, not just the former Mrs McCartney, need to start practising "enoughness" - the tipping point beyond which getting any more of anything makes life worse, not better.

Enoughness philosophy extends to our almost pathological pursuit of personal happiness. Endless "New You" makeover shows, self-help books and "I want it all and I want it now" consumerism is leaving us miserable, tetchy, anxious and a little bit unhinged. Instead we need to be more resigned to being merely content, or even, not actively unhappy, something that is hard to do when we are constantly exposed to images of the world's most beautiful women and wealthy men that make us feel inadequate by comparison. As it turns out, we're barking up the wrong tree aping the rich and famous anyway. The London School of Economics' World Happiness Survey rates Bangladesh as the most contented nation on the planet, while Britain ranks 32nd and the US 46th.

As I write, a call centre rings on behalf of my garage. My car is all of four years old. Am I thinking of replacing it? For a few seconds I experience mild anxiety. Is the car depreciating hopelessly? If I don't spend money that I haven't got to upgrade it now, will I rue it later? Then I think, to hell with that, the car's fine. And anyway, the mortgage is shooting up next month. I'm in a "post-more" phase and I'm practising "enough". And you know what, it makes me feel oddly centred, this satisfaction of saying no. Not outrageously happy, perhaps, but contented enough.