Recently I’ve written a lot about materialism and how uninformed we are of our own real desires and intentions.
We the people do not want more things. What we want is to feel. We don’t buy energy drinks because they are full of sugar, taste good, or because other people buy them. We buy energy drinks because they make us feel energized. They make us feel productive. You and I both know how great of a feeling that is.
This is positive emotionalism at its finest.
And positive emotionalism (seeking out and leveraging what makes us feel good) is expensive. Our desires are manipulated by marketing, but what’s more important is that we do seek out items that make us feel one way or another, regardless of being marketed to. In more simple terms, if we were never marketed to, we would still find energy drinks that make us feel productive because the feeling is what we really want.
How does this affect you and me?
Research has shown that we don’t necessarily work more each week. If anything, we work less and have more leisure time. On the other hand, I would argue that during the hours we do work, that we work harder. Furthermore, the hours that we don’t clock in, we find ourselves still working. For what?
We’ve exchanged leisure time with our pursuit of how we want to feel. The defining principle here is that our pursuit has lead us to consume rather than enjoy, to buy instead of play, and to fall into instantly crippling debt when we could be doing something remarkable with our leisure time.
Marketers don’t control us. Materialism doesn’t control us.
But our ignorance of “how” we can feel the way we want to feel – that’ll be the death of us. After all, it already is the cause of our “non-existent” leisure time.
We have to search for less consuming ways to feel the way we want to feel if we ever want our leisure time back. Problem is, true leisure is the most likely place we’ll find it.
Stay Positive & Oh, The Irony. Sensitivity Has Left Us Senseless.
Garth E. Beyer
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