05 mei A lifelong RATrace,

So much of our life is lived in a fog of automatic habitual behavior. It just seems that nothing ever quite does it for us. Humanity is wrapped up in the hunt, completely focussed on material things. Utterly trapped in an endless, self-defeating but mostly pointless pursuit. Mindless consumption in an consumer economy. We’re all buying crap that we do not need. We’re spending money faster than earning it.

Buying our way to happiness,

Thinking you’ll get there one day. Living for stuff, but actually not living at all. “How do we go from working all throughout a lifetime, to enjoying a lifetime with a bit of work here and there”, Jay Austin said with a calm voice. Bullseye! That definitely spoke volume! People in the West are experiencing the best standards in history, when it comes to living our lives. But why is it, that there is such a longing for more. Delusional cravings, which are creating a total disconnect. Restlesness. Dissatisfaction. Addiction.

We seem to be wired to become dissatisfied,

Trapped in an illusion of what our lives should look like. We get encouraged to maintain the addiction by technology and information, marketing and social media. And many of us see no alternative but just to live this way. We came to a point in life that advertising has polluted and infiltrated culture, books, tv shows, taxi cabs, bars, movies .. You name it.

More media, more options, more noise!

But in fact, less is more! You are getting totally distracted of what’s really important. You are bringing all kinds of stuff into your life without questioning. Stuff is getting cheaper, stuff is more available and compared to the 50’s our houses are three times bigger. The cheaper the stuff, the more we buy .. So we’re just accumulating stuff. And because of that we need more space. Fun fact, there’s a 2.2 billion square foot personal storage industry .. Which is ludicrous. Research has been done with a heatmap to monitor where people traveled inside there homes .. It turned out that most of them only used around a 40% of their space. Read that again!

Simplicity boils down to: Identify the essential – Eliminate the rest.

The world is in need of simplicity. Having less, means choosing less. Means less organizing. Less bills and lower costs. Just a simple life. Get inspired, and watch the Netflix-documentary to double check if you’re trapped too.

Bron: NETFLIX – MINIMALISM (a documentary about the important things)