English, asked by ajishboss7886, 1 year ago


life without material things can be good

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Answered by meghathakur2808
0

Material things do not necessarily bring you happiness. That is a fact of life. It is a hard fact to understand sometimes, especially in a society that tries very hard to teach you otherwise.

It is very common to get into a mode where you think, "If only I had object X, my life would be perfect and I would be happy." You REALLY want something: a new TV, a new car, a special pair of shoes, whatever. Then you buy it and you LOVE having it for a few days. But over time you get bored or it wears out. You can see this pattern repeated constantly in your own life. For example, your parents and grandparents likely spent thousands and thousands of dollars on toys for you as you were growing up: Dump trucks and Barbie dolls and video games and electric cars and on and on and on. All of those toys got boring or broken or outgrown eventually. They brought happiness for a moment or a week, but over time they became worthless and your desire turned to a new object.

This pattern begs the following question: "If material things bring just a temporary and short-term happiness, then what does that mean?" It might mean that you have to buy material objects at a rate of perhaps one per day to sustain the temporary and short-term high of getting something new. The problem is, that begins to sound a lot like a drug habit. This train of thinking can get you into some very deep areas. Things like:

What is happiness?

What does it mean to be happy?

What do I want to do in my life?

Does life have meaning?

And so on.

Very deep.

There is a difference between material happiness, which implies having all the basic (or extravagant) comforts necessary to live life, and spiritual happiness, which implies something else altogether. I had a friend whose philosophy was this:

No matter how much money you make, you always want more. So if you make $25,000 (1997) you believe that if you just made $50,000 you would be happy. But then you begin to make $50,000. At that point you believe that if you just made $100,000 you would be happy, and so on through life. This pattern is true whether you make $25,000 or $10,000,000 a year, because as you earn more money you acquire more expensive tastes. It seems to me that you might as well learn to be happy on $25,000 a year, figure out an easy way to earn it and then have the rest of your time free to do what you want.

This sort of philosophy implies that you can find something other than material happiness to give meaning to your life.

The thing about "wealth" is that there is more than one way to measure it. Traditionally it is measured in dollars, but there are many other scales. You can be "rich" in ways that have nothing to do with money. For example:

Rich in friends—A person who cultivates friendships and who is a joy to be around can have hundreds of good friends and can be rich beyond the wildest dreams of others.

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