Dreamer's World January 13 2017 - Contentment

It is very easy to get all caught up in the material world. Every single day we are bombarded by advertisements that seek to portray us as inadequate human beings if we don’t have the “latest and greatest’ of everything that is available. The question of need is never addressed because the goal is to sell, sell SELL regardless.

I think that another more important question is whether or not we are content with what we already have. It is so easy to look at the latest tech toy and think that it would be nice to have. I always stop at that point and try to rationalize why I think I need it. I have learned a nice trick to getting out of that predicament that I would like to share.

If we imagine that we are already living at our capacity and have no more room, that is to say that we have what we need, then the question becomes “what would this new item replace?” A new laptop seems like a nice investment, but what about the one that I already have? Is it still working? Is there any reason that I cannot use it any longer? Am I willing to part with it if I chose to purchase a new laptop? If the question to these answers is that I already have one that works, it does everything that I need it to do, and to throw it away to make room for a new one would be incredibly wasteful to say the least.

I think that we need to ask those questions more often in our lives. It gives us a sense of perspective and truly defines the glaring difference between “need” and “want”. Contentment is a frame of mind as well as a physical level. It is the place where we live when we want to escape the outside world for awhile. We don’t need commercialization or greed in our place of comfort.