How Much Is Enough?
The human race is experiencing a massive population explosion. This planet does not have enough resources to sustain the seven billion plus people living on it. I am only somewhat familiar with term exponential growth, but it may apply to our situation. We cannot hope to expand our civilization into the universe. While the universe is infinite, the resources needed to maintain our existence is not. What the Earth has available for us is limited.
My theory and this is not actually "my" theory, is that humans have a false sense of deprivation. Not all of us of course, but I feel safe in saying that this statement is true for most of us. I have discovered this feeling of lack in myself. It's a hidden feeling of emptiness that consumes our souls. To fill this hole we try desperately to fill it with material pleasures and possessions. In doing so, the hole opens wider, so that we are forced to feed it more and more. In the end, we find that our efforts are in vain because a desperate feeling of lack cannot be filled this way.
Deprivation is humanity's greatest fear. I can see in it the world. It's this insane sense of lack that caused the Israelites of the Old Testament to hoard manna (a kind of food) even after their God told them that they would never go hungry. The Israelites ignored their God and hoarded the manna. The manna became spoiled. Did humans learn anything from this Biblical lesson? Apparently not.
So when is enough . . . enough? Because humanity feels it is deprived, there will never be enough.
A television commercial that came out a few months ago, confirms my belief in society's insatiable and unnatural appetite for material goods. It's an AT & T commercial where a business professional asks a small group of children "Who thinks more is better than less?" A little girl replies (direct quote from YouTube), "More is better than less because if there's more less stuff, then you might want to have some more. However, your parents won't let you because there's only a little. If you really like something, you'll want more of it." She then says, "We want more. We want more."
There is another AT&T commercial where the same business professional asks another small group of children "Is faster better than slow?" These are terrible messages we are giving our children. Realize that we are sending this harmful message to future generations. Do we want our grandchildren and great grandchildren to feel an unsettling inner sense of lack and deprivation?
I can assure my readers that if we continue to give our children this dreadful message of lack, there will be no great-grandchildren. I am not using tea leaves in making this prediction. In fact, this is not a prediction. What I am saying is based on the condition of the global economy and global warming. A poorly maintained vehicle will only stall and backfire for so long before it finally dies in the middle of the street. We are consuming the remaining resources of this beautiful planet at an alarming rate. This false sense of deprivation is driving us to destroy everything on this planet in effort to fill our emptiness.
Is it possible for us to us to get enough the way we are going about it?? Of course not. We falsely believe that we are deprived. This mistaken belief sets us up for failure. All of the plagues of modern society, like stress, anxiety, mental illness, addictions, etc., are the result of a false sense of deprivation. Anxiety and depression have become so prevalent in our society that it's unusual to find a person who is not taking mood altering medications to manage these unnecessary conditions.
I'm not going to explain why I believe an almost innate sense of lack would lead to these unhealthy disorders. I feel it would better for my readers to think about it.
When I was growing up in 1980's, everyone wanted be a millionaire. A million dollars was considered to be an obscene amount of money in the decadent eighties. In the last ten or twenty years the bar was raised to a billion dollars. Travie McCoy came out with song last year called "Billionaire." The main lyric goes "I wanna be a billionaire, so fricking bad / Buy all of the things I never had." I'm so glad Travie McCoy wrote this song. I hope the people of world listen to this song and get the message I am hearing . . . How much is enough?
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