When you have things so good you can't help but want more. And this society is limitless. Its provisions are never ending as long as our massive foreign reserves are there to bail the economy out, this prosperous, voracious economy! Growing and growing and growing, and is that all that matters? Why do we make the rich even richer? Surely we should put some kind of limit, some kind of cap as to how rich a person can be. Is that not for his benefit?
Everytime Apple sells an iPhone it makes over $300 worth of profit. $300?! Surely that is too much! We cannot be so obsessed with these material things, these temporal things because what will become of them when we cross that line, enter into death? All these things will remain on the other side of that wall and in death we go as we came, with nothing. Absolutely nothing. The study of economics is to study what is driving the greed and thirst of everybody. Money and money and money. What drives a whole lot of evil.
I am such a hypocrite. I shop too much and I indulge too frivolously. Yet I look at others and think, no. I want that. Why can't I have that. Why don't I deserve that. I deserve that more than they do. But who says so? I do not. I do not want to covet anything, anymore, forever, for eternity. I know that is impossible, but it is exhausting to keep wrenching myself out from that state of mind, from that fixation on needing more. I write all this, in a few days I might just do something that I am criticizing in this post -- but I'm human and I have weaknesses. I will have those hypocritical moments but what I am feeling now, this vague shape that is trying to fill my body up to my fingertips, this rejection, this repulsion of all the things society tells me will make me happy: I want to remember this feeling.
In Nausea, Sartre talks about the irony of existence, how he exists because he thinks, how he would stop existing if he stopped thinking, yet he mustn't think that he should not think, because that is a thought, how thought processes are eternal. He says clearly, "I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire". We are such living ironies, so ironic it is sad. We throw ourselves into the very things we wish to run from. Perhaps humanity, simply, is ironic and we cannot escape. That human will and that thing you feel when you first open your eyes in the morning, its very unchangeable nature is to be at conflict with everything society says. Ironic since we are the ones who create society.
I have not found a solution.
