It’s the trickiest form of self-sabotage. We don’t even know what we’re doing.. but we find ourselves staring longingly at that delicious Porsche Panamera or that million dollar house on the hill with the awesome pool and killer view.
(If you don’t do this, that’s awesome, but a lot of us still do – including me! If you’re totally unaffected by the desire for material things, then I’ve got nothing to offer you in this article. I’ll be up front, because I don’t want to waste your time. That’s just plain rude! =) But I am betting that even the best of us still get a little tingle when we see a new TV or a fancy watch..)
It’s tough to avoid this. We’re bombarded with ‘BUY THIS NOW’ advertisements. That bad ass suit you saw on the dude in the airport, those awesome shoes that girl was wearing at that restaurant last night, the fancy sunglasses on display in the mall – it’s become (dare I say!) a natural part of us to lust after these material things.
We think that these things are the definition of success. We assign this value in our minds as a hard and fast rule and then we work our asses off so we can go buy a new pair of RayBans. And ya know what? They’re the best thing that’s happened to you for about 2 days. You get compliments and it feels great. Then that fanfare fades faster than Brett Favre’s first fifteen retirement attempts.
We become fueled by our desire to acquire a lot of ‘things’. Since this path to happiness is sort of like substituting your cocaine fix for meth, we have to constantly keep ourselves high by buying more and more useless shit.
This will not last forever. At some point we will become burnt out of the endless cycle of buying stuff to feel happy and only
Get me off this thing! I've been here for-fucking-ever and I don't even LIKE zebras.
working to be able to buy more stuff. Our lives become a monotonous carousel – the same view, the same music, the same people in front of you and behind you. It becomes fucking maddening.
Or at least it should!
It’s easy for us to slip into this means for motivation. We think, ‘If I create a business/get a job that makes a lot of money then I can buy these things’ and so we set out looking for a way to make a lot of money. We may even find a good business idea/job. (And shit, we might even move forward with that business idea and open up the business. If we’re really ambitious about getting paid and buying things the business might even start making money.)
But then, at the end of the day, what have we done? We’ve build a life around hollow rewards that are ultimately meaningless to us. We still feel unfulfilled, we still long for more sunglasses and shoes, but the only thing that’s changed is that now we are the people in the Porsche that receive those longing stares. We are the people spending a hundred hours each week working for a paycheck so we can afford all of the useless shit we’ve acquired. We’re not any happier; we’ve just magnified the way that we waste money.
If I’m bringing up some unsavory feelings and thoughts, it’s okay. I still look longingly at nice cars, nice clothes, and big houses – the difference now is I’m looking at them from my 6 year old, $3,000 Mazda (before I bought this car, I bought a brand new car every year – chasing the idea that it would make me happy) I look at them from my 50% off jeans and Target t-shirt and think, ‘Huh. Homeboy in the Porsche sure is spending a lot of money to wait in the same traffic as I am.’
Wow. I am so happy to be spending $600 a month to sit in traffic like this. With a less expensive car, this would be torture!
We allow ourselves to slip silently into this state of being because that’s how nearly everyone around us behaves. It’s not easy to get a grip on your real passions and live a life full of things that really do make us happy. It’s difficult to live our own dream instead of the dream someone else thinks we should live. The picture is very, very blurry at first and to be honest, it never really gets that clear.
Chances are your dreams are not full of 14 hour work days, conference calls, and red-eye flights from coast to coast. I can’t tell you specifically what your dreams are but I can tell you that mine look like full control over my life, the freedom to travel anywhere on the globe to visit friends or family, the ability to work when inspiration hits me (not when I’m fearing the deadline), and the chance to pass on knowledge to others.
My dreams are built on motivating people into action, inspiring others to create a beautiful existence, making people fucking laugh and let them make me laugh. My dreams allow Future Wife and me to spend time with our families, help people in need, give generously to those who need it, and create the largest positive impact we possibly can.
What do your dreams include? Dig deep! If you don’t get a least a bit teary eyed writing about them then dig deeper! Write them down even if you don’t post them here. Say them out loud. Verbalizing your dreams is so powerful. I’d love to hear about them. Please share!
Photo of TV and remote is courtesy of FlashPro
Dream Destroyer Robot was borrowed (under the Creative Commons License) from the Flickr account of Chiarashine
