What is it about Money and having more than we need that makes us delusional?
Give a man a dollar, he will strive for the next one. Generally speaking, successful, hard work is accompanied by more money. I'm not downplaying that ideal to strive for success. But what is it about an accumulation of wealth and resources that cause humans to become greedy, pretentious and delusional to believe material items supersede reality? We lose touch with it.
Competition serves to filter out the weak and bring the market to balance, but its evil accompanying twin is greed. The funny thing with greed is it fails to serve as a system of checks and balances to keep those chasing money to temper their behavior. It only feeds it.
The beauty of ecosystems and biological systems are their natural abilities to achieve balance amidst chaos. Our bodies are so resilient to physical stress and injury that it adapts in its own beautiful ways to adjust. A glut of money creates chaos, but there's no inherent system built in to strike a balance between too much and too little. Economics is the study of the production/distribution/consumption cycle, but its theories make sense because humans are no longer able to afford certain items, not because the desire for them subside. Greed is the quality in humans that debunks economic theory and creates outliers.
A glut of money is not natural to us. We've grown so accustomed to having products tailor to very specific niches of our desires (not needs) and marketing standards, that those failing to meet them can't hold our interest or our business. We no longer appreciate food, health and shelter for its core purposes - to sustain our well-being. Rather we take it for granted and only look for the best money can afford in each one - an over sized house, too much food to get us fat, clothes that serve no purpose for warmth but flaunt our wealth. We're mentally in starvation mode to want more, but it ironically serves to shorten our lives with accompanying obesity and stress.
Does anyone else notice how obvious this is? Yet we're too ignorant to change that about ourselves because the accumulation of more wealth makes us too delusional to desire less.
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction." - Albert Einstein
1 comment:
Great post! If only more people would realize these truths.... Unfortunately, consumerism has brainwashed the masses of our society. This Great Recession has changed some habits, but, sadly, most changes are only temporary.
When I read of simplier times, before credit cards, two car families, McMansions, etc, I wonder how society got to this current state. What happened to our culture?
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