Is the Materialism serious in Hong Kong? Do people in Hong Kong dream of wealth and bodily comfort rather than spiritual and intellect things? Absolutely. Living in a thriving, busy and booming city which dreams for wealth and treat the luxuries as a sign of success through the effect of media and the attitude of enjoy-the-life-the-most, misery and impoverished characteristics are dishonoured, however, it makes the whole society in Hong Kong falls into an unlimited cliff, people would never remember what the reality and the value of their life.
The most obvious way of proving materialism in Hong Kong is the flooding of advertisement and quick develop of luxuries, brand-named goods companies. The idea of become "rich" is hot around Hong Kong. There was a survey states that almost 70% of the undergraduate student looking for the goal of a better job, high salary and higher living standard after they graduate rather than study for their interest or fulfilment of their unlimited field. Theory of success has been distorted by the over loaded mass media in Hong Kong. It is easy to know where you can buy the brand-named and expensive clothes and usually they strongly mention about which successful person or movie stars have them. People then agreed with the message comes from the mass media and make themselves "look like" a successful person rather than being a "real" successful person. The dreams of wealth has the first position in Hong Kong atmosphere.
Most of the children who are raised in a high living standard family and bathing in the pool of parents' adore has been receiving over loaded information from television and advertisements. Before a child enters first grade class, and before entering in any real way into our religious ceremonies, a child will have soaked in a large amount of advertisements. The time Hong Kong teenagers adsorbing advertisements more than their total stay in high school. Especially in the small area residence environment in Hong Kong. Most of the small sized families have their corresponding small sized flats since the price of real estate in the market was in hyper inflation few years ago and never fall down its price. Children spend their time in watching TV instead of going outside, doing sports or reading books compared to the other countries. They have been raised and built up their mind mostly by the commercial TV programmes such as advertisements where children receive their ethnic value, their basic grasp of worlds' meaning and therefore create the habit of buying luxury goods, indeed, bring this feature with the children when they grow up.
The practice of buying useless or luxury goods can be considered of wasting. It is a serious effect of materialism in Hong Kong. People buy products with the reason merely because they want it, but never think about they need it or not. For instance, there was a trend of buying cards which are printed pictures of movie stars or sport
starts on it, they are useless and expensive, they don't even have the grandee of quality . People buy them because the constant advertisements on TV which gave a strong message of having those valuable and collectable cards is showing you are the outstanding people among your friends. Although this can be considered as a childish idea, many people still bought it crazily. After the trend, the cards are no longer exist and nobody wants it when people began to throw away their "valuable and collectable" cards in to the garbage bin. A tree can produced 10,000 cards, if there were 10,000 people have the cards and each of them have a full set, that is 100 cards, therefore 100 tress would be gone just for these cards in Hong Kong which only exist for half of a year, and then theses 100 trees were thrown away. Materialism in Hong Kon g has raised up environment pollution as its result.
The growing wealth gap between both rich and poor in Hong Kong is wider than the last decade. Since the idea of wealth has been grown deeply in Hong Kong, the poor people cannot afford to buy those expensive and luxury goods which represents an image of success are easy to jealous of the others. Many social problems could be created, such as robber, stealing, or fighting between the poor and the rich. It is an unhealthy situation in social problems according to the Hong Kong society. Undistributed income in the economy is the same as unequal value of determining a person.
In conclusion, materialism idea therefore is the aspect of people in Hong Kong which can be considered as over consumption. The dreams of wealth and vogue of having brand-named products become popular in Hong Kong. If this fashion goes on and doesn't its attitude, more environment pollution and possible social problems finally would be the sacrificed events under the serious materialism in Hong Kong.
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