What is a good life?
28th January 2022
Our addiction as a society to having things the way we want them to be is one of the biggest sources of suffering.
The western world enjoys the highest level of comfort and convenience in history. We can have anything and everything at our fingertips. However, having it all is also making us deeply unhappy.
Getting used to having anything we want can be bad for our mental health. In a capitalist society having to pay for the things we’ve grown more and more accustomed to means having to be constantly hustling for money.
We’ve basically have been primed, slowly but surely, to want things. Big corporations make the rules about what’s a good life and what kind of person you need to be in order to be happy with yourself.
We’ve basically outsourced the design of what a good life is to these big faceless businesses. In this moment in time, when we could be at the pinnacle of freedom, we check out and let them design our future.
You may have noticed that financing a modern lifestyle comes at a price. You need to earn money and loads of it. That’s where it gets tricky, because now you need to go to work, sometimes in something you don’t like, to get money, to pay for the dream they’ve sold you.
The whole thing is skewed as you’re going to work in a job you don’t like, so you can buy things they’ve convinced you to want. You’re just following the herd and the directives of governments and corporations that are making the rules that we all live by. Is that a good life?