Money Makes You Miserable?
Art of Money has a post called ‘How to be wealthy in 5 minutes‘. Spoiler: it prompts you to focus on the wonderful things in life now, and stop wanting things so much. Jon, I was expecting a giveaway! Just kidding. I agree. Constantly wanting things can be wearying and disturbing.
Example: Check out this video of a teenage girl, who gets a flash new car for her 16th birthday, having an uber-tantrum because it’s not what she wanted.
But is it wrong to want things? The philosopher Schopenhauer, who was always a bit of a downer, said that life is like a pendulum that swings between the desire of wanting something (which he considered suffering) and the ambivalence/boredom that comes when you get what you want. High times at Schopenhauer’s School of Fun!
Still, I don’t think wanting is a bad thing per se. Maybe if you spend your life hankering after a red sports car, but if your goals relate to doing and not having, well I can’t see the harm. Being in a constant state of Zen would get old after a few minutes.
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Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
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Well I have to agree that there is a relation to the love of money and being miserable. It is not that wanting things is bad is that when this becomes your all consuming desire and thet you are willing to make other people’s lives miserable in the process. Poeple here in America just do not understand how great they have it. Perhaps if they spent some time in some developing country or even in the up and coming country of India their perspective would change.
June 27th, 2007 at 9:23 pmHi Richard. Have you been to India? I haven’t, although I was in Cambodia earlier this year and that’s probably the most shocking place I’ve seen so far in terms of poverty.
June 28th, 2007 at 5:58 pmNo actually I have never been to India but since I am in a technical field I do know some people from there. I hope I do not want to sound racist by saying that it is just that India is well known for creating programmers. I have seen some documentaries on India where the disperate nature of their socio-economy is quite apparent. You cna have brand new shiny office complexes right next to absolute poverty. Seems like the wealth of India is not being evenly distributed and I predict some uprising sometime if things do not change for the better.
June 28th, 2007 at 8:03 pm