It is instilled deep in our bones from an early age that we need certain material goods to survive and achieve happiness. By the power of societal engineering, human beings step outside of their natural desires for love, compassion and community, and begin to focus on man-made items instead.
Professionals have created schemes to make people feel as if they won’t thrive if they don’t spend their savings on new items. America is a huge participant in materialism. Although it’s difficult to change our habits and usage of materials, it can be very beneficial to our world.
Black Friday is probably one of the most obvious examples of materialistic corruption. Every year the same companies produce products with slight improvements and higher prices. These new products are what drives the middle class to wake up at crazy hours, wait in long lines and spend mass amounts of money.
It’s not the products themselves, but the emotional attachments we make with it that feed the bottomless desire to attain more. The most interesting obsession to me is cars. We name them, talk to them like babies and maybe even drool slightly when a nice one drives by. Money does buy a little happiness, but if I had a giant house with a view of the beach in Malibu, but had nobody to share it with, I wouldn’t be happy at all. This realization alone should be enough to make us change and focus on relationships with people rather than things.
So how do we break this? Do we cut off from civilization and live under the radar? At this point, I don’t think taking away all the things we grew up depending on would benefit anyone. We’re still people who like shiny things and nice beds nice at the end of the day. My point is, we should try to live a little more simplistically, take a break from our phones and remember what it’s like to be with people who make you forget you even have one.
We should become emotionally detached from anything without a pulse because it has never done any good to cry over something made in a factory. It’s hard not to want what everyone else wants, but that doesn’t make it impossible. When we focus our minds on people and trying to make the world a better place instead of making payments to satisfy our desires, those needs will start to go away entirely.
