It is instilled deep in our bones\u00a0from 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.<\/p>\n
Professionals have created schemes\u00a0to make people feel as if they won\u2019t thrive if they don’t spend their savings on\u00a0new items. America is a huge participant in materialism. Although it\u2019s difficult to change our habits and usage of materials, it can\u00a0be very beneficial to our world.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It’s not the products themselves, but the emotional attachments we make with it that feed the bottomless desire to attain\u00a0more. The most interesting obsession to me is cars. We name them, talk to them like babies\u00a0and maybe even drool slightly when a nice one drives by. Money does buy a little happiness, but\u00a0if 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.
\nSo 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\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s hard not to want what everyone else wants, but that doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It is instilled deep in our bones\u00a0from an early age that we need certain material goods to survive and achieve happiness. By the power of societal engineering, human beings step…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15070,"featured_media":9019,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15070"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9577"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9577\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9578,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9577\/revisions\/9578"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}