The recent economic downturn has affected our lives in a variety of ways. Many would choose to look at this with a negative eye but I would like to propose a different outlook. Rather than focusing on having to curb our spending and streamline our budgets, we should look at the possibility of being able to recapture what may have gotten lost… our humanity. Years of consumerism have taken a toll on our lives and society as a whole. As someone once said, “We buy things we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t like.” Although we all may not agree that the entire statement rings true in all our lives, we can agree that a part of it does. We live our lives on credit or working as many hours as we can so we can purchase the latest trend in fashion, gadgets and gizmos. Why? So we can keep up with our neighbors who just purchased a new car or with our classmate and his newly acquired mobile phone that can virtually make it unnecessary for him to interact with people and society in a real way? In spending our lives to always get and have, we may have lost something along the way–ourselves. We spend a good portion of our lives working to obtain things that are worthless in the sense that they add no intrinsic value to our lives. The more things we have, the more we seem to want. Consumerism turns into materialism and that is where we find ourselves lost. We lose touch with what it is that we really need versus what it is that we want. The lines have been so blurred that we confuse the two or try to rationalize the desired into the necessary. In doing so we lose touch with how little it is that we actually need. If we don’t need all this stuff, why are we buying it?
Has all this acquiring made us any happier? We can comfort ourselves with material things and some do make our lives easier. But on a deeper level are we truly happier because of them or are we using them as a surrogate for meaningful relationships? Do we buy things to try to fill some sort of void in our lives only to find that it’s a temporary fix? Wouldn’t we find true fulfillment in cultivating our whole being; the mind, body and spirit as well as cultivating relationships with the people around us rather than in the things that surround us? Are we so out of touch with our basic need for such interaction that we don’t even realize that there is such a need? Over the course of our lives we have been taught to look “out” rather than within for what completes us. We strive for those high paying jobs that we may not necessarily like. We buy homes that are out of our price range and struggle with the mortgage. We scrimp and save to be able to buy the latest in home entertainment. As we do this, we are not only spending resources from our bank account but also from our “human” account. The human account slowly depletes whether you take from it our not. It consistently needs deposits and investments. The sad part is that we tend to work hard to replenish the bank account. The human account gets pushed to the back burner, being ignored until something happens. Perhaps that “something” did happen. Perhaps some cosmic force, through the state of our economy, is trying to grab our attention and help us to refocus on what is truly important. The things that money can’t buy.
- Candy Condos
