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Having More Won't Make You Happy

Greg Wendt
Deep Economy_largearticlephoto.jpgAs a financial advisor, I regularly meet the "haves and have-mores." One thing is for sure: Having more does not necessarily mean more happy.

Barbara Walters interviewed billionaire media mogul David Geffen in a conversation published in More Than Money magazine: "She said, 'O.K., David, now that you’re a billionaire, are you happy?' He shot back without hesitation: 'Barbara, anybody who believes money makes you happy doesn’t have money.'"

It’s a brilliant insight, because money doesn’t make you happy. Alternet recently posted an excerpt of Bill McKibben's recent book Deep Economy: The Wealth of Community and a Durable Future. I recommend the excerpt highly; it explores the idea that the foundation of our economic assumptions must be re-evaluated and re-tooled for our modern context.

Bill speaks to the heart of the matter: Our civilization has conditioned us to believe that more is better, because we believe simply more makes us happy. We all know it's not true, but many of us are not willing to face our inner shadow work to really embody this truth in our day-to-day lives.

On a similar note, I find many in our circle of friends in the sustainability movement – myself included – living lives of accumulation and consumption even with a "modest" lifestyle. Yet as human beings, we know that more "stuff" won't make us happy.

I was speaking about this matter with my friend Marc Barasch, an accomplished author and current Executive Director of the Green World Campaign. Marc said: "The Buddhist tradition states that craving keeps the world of Samsara [eternal suffering] turning."

He continued: "What people want is love and community and the society tends to systematically undermine the means of attaining that, and consumerism is the addictive substitute. The pleasure of the addiction becomes dry and insipid and becomes simply maintenance dosage to avoid greater and greater pain. And it is this collective maintenance of our consumerism addiction that habitually and automatically devours the planet's resources."

So, since you and I have grown up in this system, we are best able to recognize the heart of the matter and begin to deal with the problem at its core. Simply put, in order for us all to manifest the sustainable world built on loving kindness to all beings, we just have to get down to this crucial "shadow work" inside of our own heart of hearts.

You know what I am talking about: inside yourself. You don't need anyone else to know what I am referring to, and you don't need anyone else to do this work inside yourself, right here, right now.

Comments

good piece, Greg.

Submitted by Daniel Pinchbeck on Mon, 05/14/2007 - 12:19.
The new green movement seems to be substituting new forms of consumerism for older ones. Personally, I doubt this is going to do the trick, as the planet's life support systems move toward meltdown. Building new large "green" buildings is still utilizing masses of energy and also increasing urban congestion. We may have to consider the idea of radically downscaling. In NYC right now, there is massive building go on all over downtown, where I live. I keep wanting to call out, "Don't do it - no more building. Its time to start taking things down." When I visited the Hopi, a Hopi elder told me he thought they should "smash up" the road built by the government through their Res. This had never occurred to me before! Once we got into the spirit of taking things down, it might become a new fad. We have to hope that experiences that utilize no or extremely sparse resources become increasingly central to our culture - yoga, meditation, breathwork, massage, etc. "Will the transformation."-Rilke

Waking from the American Dream

Submitted by ST Frequency on Tue, 05/15/2007 - 00:38.

That excerpt is really excellent! Great post and insight.

 

Reading McKibben brought the words of Alexis de Tocqueville to mind. In a remarkably astute take on civic life in the United States at the onset of the free market revolution, the French social critic expressed a prescient observation of the dilemma of unfulfilled desire in affluent American society, gleaned during his travels of the country in the early 19th century:

 

Among democratic nations, men easily attain a certain quality of condition, but they can never attain as much as they desire … At every moment they think they are about to grasp it, it escapes at every moment from their hold … and before they have fully tasted its delights, they die. That is the reason for the strange melancholy that haunts inhabitants of democratic countries in the midst of abundance.

 

This disaffection "in the midst of abundance" is indeed a disarming phenomenon in the American psyche. Alexis de Tocqueville thought the American fascination with equality and affluence would be the tragic stumbling block to the "pursuit of Happiness" so desired by its people. "The incomplete joys of this world," he warned, "will never satisfy the heart."

And to be sure, the later advancements of a commercialized and materialistic society did much to confirm Tocqueville’s suspicions, widening the economic gap and subsequently deflating the egalitarian ideals of the American Dream.

 

These quotes are from Tocqueville's seminal 1835 text, Democracy in America. Here's his wikipdedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Tocqueville

 

;)

st