Quenching the material thirst
We are living in an extreme consumer culture and what does this really mean? Materialism negates thought, feeling, human will, and faith. In a subtler course, materialism promotes the idolatry of possessions or material wealth.
Possessions are believed to fill all human needs and characterize quality of life. For a godless society, the philosophy of materialism may seem plausible.
Materialism is characterized by acquisition of material goods (lust, envy, false comfort, idolatry), self-interests, (selfishness, no compassion, greed, denies eternal soul and the creator), accumulation, equivalent to success (no morals, no sense of right or wrong, preoccupation to money, jealousy, thievery), voiding all faith and spiritual deity (hopelessness, unrepentant sin, despair, eternal death)
Life is always a pursuit, the pursuit of wealth, success, fame, fortune and pleasure. Undisciplined pursuit refers to the different means adopted in the course of this fulfilling one’s desires.
There’s struggle, fear, anger, apprehension, competition, and a myriad more complex emotions that one encounters.
The pursuit for more is a never-ending one. It’s directed from the subtle to the gross. Because, more is a relative term, what you get is never enough.
I’ve witnessed this quest for more becomes the nemesis of many in the recent past. The lust for more really is a curse that can annihilate.
Like the rate of expansion of the universe, which increases every second, this pursuit for more and more eventually tires mind, body, and spirit.
This abstraction of more, has the curse of intangibility and discontentment. It’s self-defeating. There is no answer to how much is enough. It’s a state of perpetual greed that refuses to be ever satiated.
On the other hand, all is not dark and depressing, there is a brighter alternative, the path of disciplined pursuit for less.
And this is the rational path to choose.
Self-discipline refers to the ability of the mind to restrain, to refuse to give in to senseless indulgences that can only titillate further but not bring contentment.
The exercise of quitting alcohol, serves as a good example. There was a point in time, when the mind was thinking only about the next opportunity to down a few drinks.
With self-discipline, it was possible for me to eliminate that indulgence completely.
Now, I have one demon less to exorcise in my pursuit for less. As I taper the quest to less, my mind is filled with equanimity, a strange but comforting contentment.
The fear of losing metamorphoses into the joy of relinquishing. That’s the beauty of this path.
The knowledge, that I will have less tomorrow than I have today, automatically liberates, and helps in the process of detachment.
The glue of more that makes me heavier, is now replaced by the knife that severs and lightens. What is less is also an intangible, but yet it is finite. It’s a process of involution; the path that travels inwards, the journey from the gross to the subtle.
The pursuit for the less becomes very focused and pointed. The clutter, the noise, the emotional baggage, all gets reduced and what remains is a state of blissful awareness of nothingness.
The nothingness thereafter ends the pursuit, as there can be nothing, less than nothing. The moment of epiphany is realizing that nothingness is limitless, and much more than the more, that the pursuit for more could ever conceive of.
I find few things more degrading than watching grown men fight over cut-priced consumer goods on a shopping mall floor like starving, agitated beasts on Black Friday.
It always makes me wonder: how has human civilization gone from Plato to this?
But going back to my rhetorical question, how has humanity managed to go so far astray? Although our species has always lusted over inanimate objects like gold or diamonds or oil paintings or just about any other functionally useless signifiers of wealth, the sort of rabid desire that sparks Black Friday brawls is a much newer phenomenon that only really came about in the 20th century.
Shopping gives us a cheap dopamine rush that not only satisfies us briefly on a chemical level, but spending our hard (or not-so-hard) earned cash creates a feeling of achievement: we worked, we earned it, and now we are rewarding ourselves for it with a very tangible trophy for our efforts. Fundamentally, consumerism is a socioeconomic model built upon the engineering of desire.
It’s a cheap and easily attainable feeling of success that briefly makes us feel good about ourselves, thus placating us.
It’s said that money can’t buy you happiness, and we consistently read about depressed millionaires who spend fortunes on therapists. The things you own end up owning you. If we want resilient, sustainable communities, we need to balance materialism and spiritualism.
Zulfiqarali Premji is a retired MUHAS professor. His career spans over 40 years in academia, research and public health.
