Me vs. Them
One of the things that I find painful of everyday modern life is the internal battle of me fighting against the knee reaction of buying ’stuff’. There’ll be some new gadget with sweet blinking lights that I must buy and if I have the money I debate whether I should or not. It almost hurts to not simply buy it, but in the end I find out I need the money more so then something that only satiates that mysterious void for only a little while. It’s like an addiction though, when you start buying stuff to make you forget certain problems that ail you in your life, but once the ‘high’ wears off you begin to want more just to get that same ‘high’ again. It becomes a vicious cycle, a serpent constantly eating it’s tail forever and eternity.
Now, my anti-materialist/anti-consumerist tendency begins to rear it’s head and it becomes very enraged by the fact that such a thing can get to me. Seriously, do I really need all of this stuff? Not really, when you think deep about it. A lot of it is cheap crap that only lasts for a year or so and then quits or breaks on you. After reading much on the Buddhist concept of impermanence and our fetishism for acquiring large amounts of stuff makes sense. Basically, we all die in the end, so why do we bother with suck trivial stuff such as materialism when in the end we become incorporeal and leave all materialistic and earthly items behind? Out of all of this during our life span we are burdened and stressed by acquiring and keeping all of this stuff no matter how far into debt it puts us into. It’s a form of suffering or samsara that keeps us in the cycle of pain that we perceive we can’t find a way out of. Of course, that’s a fallacy perpetuated by our rampant competitiveness to have more than our fellow human being and by a society that believes if you haven’t amassed material wealth that you are obviously an oddball that needs to be ridiculed.
In conclusion, the basis of my own personal battle is more or less fight for my own sense of moral values when it comes to materialism. I try my hardest not to be a hypocrite, but most of the time reason comes into light and saves me from a financial heartache. Of course, this is also mingled with some instances of failure on my part. Sometimes certain elements in life weaken my willpower to almost nil. As always, each experience is a learning experience and the best way to utilize such experiences is to strategically figure out a plan as to how not to have it occur again. All things about us humans and our decisions is always reliant on us and not someone or something. We are our fate makers.
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