We have seen a lot of videos, read a lot of articles, and heard a lot of talks about how materialism is ruining people's lives and even the planet itself. Still, despite those moments after absorbing those information where we realize how meaningless our lives seem, we still continue to live such life. If you want to know why, let me tell you all about it.
The Survival
I remember the words of my Developmental Psychology professor clearly when I think about this,
Someday you'll have more money--that's development--but it's not necessarily happiness...
It's awfully deep like that Existential interview of Jim Carrey below:
It does make you question at some point, "what am I chasing with this money?" to which a lot would have some emotional moment or whatever but something I know I could enumerate a ton of answers for. Let's not talk about the cliché fake happiness "truth" about materialism. Instead, let's just accept the fact that it really eats us up inevitably.
We NEED money, and that's never going to change or at least it hasn't the past thousands of years. There has always been exchanges for resources or our survival. Based on Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, we need to sustain our physiological needs the most to go for the rest of our fulfilling needs, and of course that's made possible by the stuff in our wallet. From there, we need to keep going until we reach what we call the self-actualization which does not really work these days without any kind of resources owned by money, yet is taught to us as that peak of satisfaction. So we keep working for more and more cha-ching 💲💲
It's funny because we don't even know what we exactly want, do we? Now this is where materialism really gets to us..
Not-So-Free Trial
We would rather spend for ourselves than spend for others, and this is also not bad. People say it's an unhappy life to have no one to share everything with, but even if we did it would not really matter as much because our happiness or the lack thereof is an individually internal thing. Through materialism, we keep ourselves alive because we have so much to use when to be honest, it is true that everyone is just waiting for their life to end. Life is good and we can philosophize everything about its negativity to turn it into positivity but it will never change the fact that no one here asked to be born in the first place.
Through abundance, we are able to prosper through the sense of having to make use of what we own, keep it growing, and keep enjoying it. If we had nothing at all, not even a dream to own and conquer something, we wouldn't like living or at least fighting to keep doing so.
So Am I Materialistic?
I believe so just like everybody else. I want to own and experience a lot of things possible with money that's why I work hard for it. I know it's like a whole system--that materialism--trapping me in it, but like I said, had I not developed a dream for something as big as that beach house I wanna have someday, I would have never enjoyed fighting for my survival here in life. Instead, I would probably be one of those hopeless kids in university still lacking any concrete goal or idea of what life they want to live someday because they think nothing is ever going to make them satisfied. Tip is, perhaps it's best we try to trick our minds into thinking there is an ultimate source of joy we are all meant to find someday anyway, so keep making them cash and investing on all those things you invest in. It doesn't hurt to buy happiness since you only live once.
