Photo by ShawnCampbell

The most successful ideology to spread across the world in the past century is consumerism.  While so many people argue about political ideologies and which ones are more successful, consumerism seems to have slipped by unnoticed since it can thrive in almost any political system.  Basically, it is the idea that a person’s happiness is directly connected to the amount of material possessions they amass.

To think that buying things is what will make us happy seems downright silly.  Sure materials can give you temporary pleasure or even long-lasting pleasure, but to equate this pleasure with happiness is wrong.  Most of the time, the pleasure gotten from buying things is not even a result of the intrinsic value of the object, it is a result of how it satisfies our egos.  The demand for luxury products is in large part driven by the need for people to feel superior to others.  The Lexus is better than the Toyota, the $2 million house vs. the $1 million house.  What do extra bedrooms have to do with our happiness?  Will I not be able to achieve contentment in my life if I don’t have leather seats in my car?

This idea can cause us to run blindly toward the objects we desire without paying attention to what we are doing to get them.  People end up working jobs that they don’t like so that they can pay for things they don’t need.  College students are studying subjects that will make them the most money so that they can get the best house and car.  If a person’s life is spent doing things without passion just to obtain these goods, in the end, life will have been a complete waste.  The happiness comes in the way we live every second of it, not just in the moments where we finally are able to buy that new flat screen.  We end up suffering to achieve these ends.

Every time a goal is met and a purchase is made, the pleasure dissipates quickly.  The new suit will not bring the same excitement everyday.  So then you have to find something else to desire, to work toward, to get the next high from.  With this ideology, we end up living from object to object, never realizing why it never lasts each time.  The idea of a life lived in a futile pursuit is horrifying, yet people are not horrified at themselves.  Desire and pleasure should not be confused with happiness, that is the first mistake.  Now, even the younger generations are being programmed to operate this way, along with other cultures who had escaped this thinking before.  There’s a reason why there is starting to be a shift in thinking toward Eastern philosophy in the United States.  Some are realizing that materials are not the source of happiness.  But all of this starts with questioning.  We must constantly question our motives and examine our definitions.  It is only with constant oversight that we start to shift our own minds.

Photo by Stephen Brace

Lately I’m confronted with more and more people that act inconsistently with their goals.  The ideas they express in conversation remain as just that, they never seem to implement these ideas in their life.  Some of the time these people are not really committed to what they’re saying.  Maybe they’re taking part because they’re trying to project a certain image of who they want to be viewed as.  But I’m talking about the people who do believe in the ideas they express.

I have friends that constantly talk one way and act a different way.  When we have conversations, they will say how they wish it were this way or that.  They even know what they have to do to get there, but they just don’t act.  I think it just comes down to being lazy or afraid of the process.  Most people become too comfortable with the way they are to act on most of their ideas.  The people who do end up changing drastically seem to be the ones who experience some sort of jarring event in their lives that takes away their complacence.  I can understand how it’s easy to turn away from the work at hand by settling for the way things already are, but with that sort of thinking, any potential for learning and growing is eliminated.

It seems a waste that someone not follow through when they’ve already done the initial steps of thinking about what has to be done.  Changing oneself is never going to be very easy or comfortable, but if we constantly wait for what’s easy, we will never end up getting anywhere.  “That’s just the way I am,” this is one of the phrases I most dislike hearing.  I think it’s incorrect to define yourself as your behaviors and attitudes at any one point in time.  These things are ever-changing over the course of our lives.  Just the fact that they have the potential for change points to the idea that they are not your definition.  Your habits don’t decide who you are, you define what your habits will be.

If we can view our outer behavior as something that is dynamic and ever changing, then we make ourselves able to constantly change along with life, as we must.  If we start to attach our being with our habits, then we weigh ourselves down and have to face lots of work in order to change anything.  If we are dynamic and not defined by habits, then we will be indifferent to any change as it does not determine who we are.  It will be simple to cast off one thing and add another.  Our potential for change is determined by the way we define ourselves.

It still amazes me when I find that so much of our answers are already right in front of us but nobody seems to notice. Yesterday I was in a Psychology class of at least 100 people while the professor went over the concept of an authentic self and an egoistic self. These are the two components of our personalities according to one theory.

The egoistic self is comprised of what we think is desirable by the people around us and the part that is created by us to gain their approval. The authentic self is what we really are and what tendencies we are born with. Everyone has both of these sides, it is only a matter of what kind of balance each person has created between these two.

It seems to me that most people are heavily weighted in the egoistic self and this is clearly noticeable in how similar our behaviors are. Human beings are naturally social creatures and seek approval from those that are around them, but sometimes it goes too far. When someone is deeply entrenched in the egoistic self, an image that they have created for themselves to be more liked by others, their true self suffers and becomes forgotten. As they get more and more used to this and end up living a life very different from what they really want, they get depressed and maybe start questioning why they’re unhappy. This isn’t necessarily something that happens years down the line, this is something that probably happens to most of my peers as well. The part that astonishes is me that this information is being presented to some of these people in my class and they probably wont give it a second thought other than to copy it down and memorize it for an exam.

Even as you’re reading this, think about the qualities that you’ve tried to emphasize in yourself. Did you want to be more funny? smart? good-looking? strong? popular? I know I have. As we try to show these qualities that aren’t naturally a part of who we are, we step farther and farther away from the people that we really should be. To put on the show for the rest of the world can be a great burden. This burden will undoubtedly affect the clarity and freedom of your mind and actions.

A lot of the unhappiness in ourselves can be solved simply by questioning our motives and finding out who we really are outside of our social images. If we are able to live according to what we truly want, whether or not this is something that will make others like us, then we can improve our well-being as people. Who knows, we might even be able to effect change in other parts of our lives with this new found awareness.

I’ve always been very critical of how people are programmed from day 1 to operate a certain way in our society. I had never really thought of the benefits this may have until this summer. I was back in India and had a lot of time to kill during the day so I decided to try and teach basic math to our maid. I spent about a week trying to get her to understand the concept of multiplication and it seemed as hopeless as ever. She could replicate answers to previous problems I gave her, but she couldn’t figure out any new ones for herself because she didn’t really have an understanding of how it all worked.

This made me think of how part of the conditioning society provides for us is our education. After seeing the poor display by our maid, this made me a little glad that I had been exposed to higher learning and had the luxury of thinking about the bigger questions in life. It’s hard to imagine someone who isn’t able to understand math being able to understand other abstract ideas. I think there is some point in our learning where the law of diminishing returns comes into effect. For example, getting a PhD will not affect my ability to reason as much as my kindergarten class did. So I assume that there is some necessary level of education that human beings should have which will afford us the luxury of thinking for ourselves and analyzing the ideas that govern our thinking.

The trick is to learn as we grow up but not take everything at it’s word. Instead of going to school and memorizing information to spit back at our parents, professors, and future employers, we should try to learn and understand the material for ourselves and think of what it means to us. That is after all, at least I think, the benefit of humanity’s ability to reason. If we don’t do this, then we really aren’t getting as much as we can out of our learning and instead of something that can help bring us to a higher plain of consciousness, we let it hold us even more tightly in the cages of society’s programming.