What is one of the main reasons for many of the problems, we are facing in this world?
We crave for too much. We love to buy and collect a lot of things. Me included.
We actually know, we have enoguh. But our emotions tell us, we need more. We fear not to have enough. To lack of something.
There are so many people out there, who live with way less, than we do. And they survive as well. So compared to them, our fear is obviously irrational.
The good thing is, when we know about our fears, we can handle them in a different way. Often we just fear the fear itself, not the thing we think we fear of.
With that knowledge we can think about our whole consumption-oriented world differently.
There is a beauty in living a life with less. And its not only beautiful, it makes so much more sense. To us and our lifes.
1. What is the main reason why a huge part of our western society is facing money problems?
Because we don't earn enough? Maybe. But what about those, who have a middle five figure (or higher) income?
Advertisement tells us to buy and we love to fight or emotion of fear with the emotion of joy.
As we all know, it's a rat race.
The fear of lacking takes us outside and makes us selling our lifetime by doing any kind of job. When the salary comes, our greed gets us and lets us imagine all the nice things we could buy. Until the money is finished and the fear comes again.
Do we need the latest phone to be happy? Do we need it so much, that we would be ok to feel the fear of not having enough money again?
2. What is the main reason we face time problems?
Is it, because we don't work efficiently enough? Should we answer my emails more quickly when we go to the toliet? Should we sleep less?
We all have 24 hours a day. A common day would be eight hours of sleep, eight hours of work and eight hours for ourselfs. So no wonder, that we feel like not having enough time, when we only use 1/3 of our day for ourselfs.
We could sleep less, yes. But that actually makes us having less time, because it makes us unhealthy and we die younger.
So what about the eight hours a day a lot of us use (me inlcuded) to work for someone else's dreams? Yes, we do need the money. But the point is, when we resist the craving to buy more, we don't need to work so much, so we need less money.
So we have more time for our family and friends.
When we consume less, we can live more. Simply because we have more lifetime.
Because we don't need to exchange so much of our lifetime with money.
3. What is the main reason why we face climate problems?
The economy grows and grows. People have to spend their money, for this growth to work. And we love that!
We love using cars. We love to travel around. We love to buy.
But therefor a lot of resources are needed. And the earth gets exploided.
We should be consuming, because it makes life also enjoyable. But I think we have to change the way we do that.
Let's take the public transport. Saves money (lifetime), traffic stress, we have more time to talk to people in the train, time to work or to read a book.
There is a study that adds up all the expenses for a car.
Things like insurance, gasoline and the car itself.
And that calculation proofs, that the time we save with the car, because we are faster, is often way less, than the time we actually need to work for the money, to afford the car.
In objectivity, owning a car is often a waste of lifetime.
I am one of those guys who really liked traveling the world, and I still do.
And there is one lesson, that I learned:
In the end traveling is not about the place where we are, but about the feeling of freedom we have, when we travel. About the people we travel with.
So why not save our money (lifetime) and the earth and travel by bus to a closer place? There are so many places that we have'nt seen, that are close to us.
Let's buy used things and safe our money (lifetime). Very often the stuff we can buy „used“ is not even used, but just a wrong purchase of someone else.
And whenever we buy something, lets buy quality! So we don't have to buy it twice and if it gets broken, it still worths to fix it. Safes a lot of money (lifetime)!
4. What is one of the reasons we don't get things done?
We get distracted. Not in a nice way, that it would actually be fun.
When we work on something and messages are constantly coming, our mind has to jump.
From work to family to work to holiday to work to weekendplans and back to work. And so on. Too much for our brain.
Facebook was designed „to make sure users spent as much time on the site as possible.“
(Sean Parker, first President of Facebook)
Why not just call somebody, when we want to communicate with them?
Instead of texting half an hour, the whole situtaion could be solved by talking to each other for five minutes. That would again safe a lot of time (money).
In addition a real personal conversation also improves the relationship:)
In the end we all have something like 70 or 80 years of lifetime. Let's use it well!