Materialism, or consumerism, is designed to make you unhappy: “Your life is shit right now, because you don’t have the new iPhone! Imagine how much better your life would be if you had the new iPhone!”
That’s how advertising works. It creates the illusion that your life is not complete, not perfect, not your best life, unless you buy the latest gizmo.
Then you struggle to come up with the money to buy the gizmo. And when you finally buy it, you have a brief moment of joy, before the next ad tells you to buy the next gizmo, because your life is shit.
This cycle continues until you drop dead. As long as you seek happiness in material goods, you will never be happy. Happiness will always be just out of reach. There’s always one more gizmo you need to buy, for a moment of fleeting happiness that quickly disappears.
Buying more and more stuff isn’t gonna make you happier:
America, desperate for happiness, is getting less and less happy.
Is consumerism robbing us of our humanism and happiness?
The desire to acquire: Why the novelty of buying new things soon wears off
When the novelty wears off: When shiny object syndrome negatively affects our daily lives.
Why over-consumption is making us unhappy
Here’s proof buying more stuff actually makes you miserable
The psychology of materialism, and why it’s making you unhappy
A psychologist explains why materialism is making you unhappy
The path to real, lasting happiness is to realize that happiness is not external. It’s not something you can buy.
You can never have everything. You can either be miserable about that your entire life, and chase the next gizmo, and the next, and the next, or you can accept that what makes people truly happy is not the next gizmo.
Happiness is knowing that you don’t really need the next gizmo to be happy.
Happiness is be content.
Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world. Why is he still trying to make more and more and more money? Because no amount is ever enough.
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