F*ck Materialism

F*ck Materialism

 — listen to the hippies.

via Rasmus Hammarberg

I had my tablet stolen a while back. This pissed me off because now I would be forced to waste time gathering notes from past lectures, and then obviously because someone stole my fucking property.

Then came the other thoughts, my faith in humanity pierced and stereotypes rising in its wounds, and I shook my head because there was nothing else to do. Shit like this happens to people like me, and there are lessons to be learned in anger and spite and those other emotions we push so deep into our hearts that they stay there. This is another tool for greed to create itself.

This is how cynics are born.

And of course they are, because when a fellow man steals your property it manifests the issues inherent in mankind, and then you lose your faith in this mankind. What this creates is a faith that touches no one but yourself, and you become the only one you think you know you can trust. This, in turn, is followed by a belief that you are worth more, simply because the others are worth less.

Thus you turn to greed, to promoting yourself as much as possible, gathering shit to then die happily in a pile of toys you have collected during a lifetime of disbelief and hands never letting go of what they have once grabbed.

But it should not be this way, and perhaps it does not have to. Because one of the issues with having a materialistic greed pumping beneath your chest bones is that it makes you put your faith in material goods, and place your happiness neatly in between them.

And this makes you vulnerable, because material goods are exposed and can be take away faster than you can say feel-the-fabric-of-my-new-suit. And if your faith, and your happiness, is located in these material goods, they can be taken away just as quickly, and then you stand there with a dumb look on your face and wonder where did I lose myself this time? And so it seems as if there should be a better way of handling the situation, and perhaps this solution involves going the opposite way.

Maybe these situations should be interpreted as signs that materialism has taken one step too many and should be stopped. After all my tablet would probably not have been stolen had materialism not had such a tight grip around our pants, shaking them until every nickel has been gathered from the curb below.

And this seems to contain some truth. Fancy stuff has never made me laugh like the woman I love, and never made me reminisce about the times when the tips of her fingers not really touched my skin but almost. I never embrace minimalistic design like I do with my family, and tears have never been shed on their shoulder blades like they have when I have parted ways with my mother.

This might be because I do not take materialism to the extreme, and there are probably those who actually do cry when Siri says good night, but maybe the hippies were right after all. Maybe we should start caring about other things instead, focusing on creating masterpieces and putting words next to one another, forcing them to tangle their fingertips around each other’s waists.

Of course this does not mean trust everyone and lay your possessions out on your stoop, and of course cynics will just shrug and say those naive kids never learn.

But this is not what the issue is really about. Because the issue I am talking about is not our trust in one another, but what happens next, after your trust have proved flawed and you are tempted to go all cynical and greedy on me. What I am talking about is realizing that it is merely a sign that you should be focusing your attention elsewhere, and then do so.

What I am talking about is saying fuck those kids and their swift hands, putting your focus where it belongs, be it on your family, your education, the book you are writing, in the act of getting up every morning, telling yourself today I am going to be awesome, or on the simple realization that people like me should not have fancy shit.

rebellesociety.com

Trends

Trends come and go.

Not many of them ever last for long.

It's just the majority thing at the time.

Where you find more just joining the line.

In the forties, it was big band.

In the fifties, it was the style.

In the sixties, it was the hippies, the music.

And through all three, it was the clothes.

Remember trends come and go.

It the seventies, it was disco.

Up until rap came along.

And country became rock and roll.

Trends, forever evolving into something else.

Which a member of each generation can confess.

Just when you think they are gone.

Suddenly, they come back along.

With a slightly different look and name.

But too many, they are one and the same.

Jeffrey Conyers