Meconomics: Can you Buy Happiness?

This post is a continuation to:

Meconomics: I need my Wants and Want my Needs to be Satisfied
Meconomics: Wants and Needs in your Daily Living 
Meconomics: Do you Spend your Money Objectively or Subjectively?
 


I ended off my previous post with the following:

“So – we have looked at how wants can in a moment override a need – where we identified subjective experiences and time as important players – but we can look a bit further and ask: why does it sometimes feel like we ‘NEEEED’ the things that we ACTUALLY don’t need. Objectively speaking – they are wants, things you can go without – and yet, you can experience a sense of ‘urgency’ and ‘must have’ and ‘I need it’ towards that which you want. Now wants really start messing with your sense of priority, lol. It’s one thing to be clear on the fact that what you are enticed by in a moment is not something you truly need, but you want to indulge yourself anyway – it’s another to feel like you actually NEED it when you don’t.”

Let’s do an exercise: search for one of those moments in your memory – a moment where: you felt that you absolutely NEEDED to have something, where, if you look back at it now, you didn’t ACTUALLY really need it, but you wanted it so bad that it FELT like you needed it. Now zoom in to the actual experience of need and ask yourself the following: were you experiencing physical discomfort? Were you deprived of something on a physical level, which needed replenishing to ensure you remain functional in your body? Were you in physical danger?

You’ll see that the answers to those questions are ‘no’ – because the apparent ‘need’ was not experienced on a physical level – it was instead experienced on an ENERGETIC/ EMOTIONAL level – where we feel we are being emotionally tortured so long as we don’t go and buy whatever it is we’ve now fixated on wanting to get. If those are not actual, physical, genuine needs, then what are they?

Here we need to actually look at different types of wants or desires. And more specifically – how realistic our expectations are of fulfilling these wants and desires. See – you can want to have a cup of coffee, because you expect that for a moment you’ll really enjoy drinking that coffee and it might assist you being more focused and awake for a short period of time – and when actually having that coffee – that’s exactly what you’re experiencing and what happens. That would be a want with realistic expectations. A want with unrealistic expectations, would be for instance if you want to buy the newest smart-phone because you think your friends will accept you if you keep up with the latest tech trends. What you actually want here, or expect to gain – is acceptance – that is the underlying want you are looking to fulfil. Now smartphones can increasingly do very impressive stuff – but giving you acceptance in yourself and your life is a huge and unrealistic responsibility to place on any phone. Realistic expectations of fulfilling a want stand in direct relation to the actual properties and functions of your want. If you like the taste of coffee, then you will enjoy drinking that cup of coffee and coffee has the characteristic and property of keeping you awake and more focused for a little while – those expectations stand in direct relation to your want, which is coffee. Acceptance however, is not directly related to a smartphone – it’s not within its power to give that to you. When you buy a smartphone, what you will get is a smartphone – acceptance is not part of the package.

It is when we have such unrealistic expectations of fulfilling a particular want – that the experience of ‘want’ can be experienced as a ‘need’ or a ‘must have’. And this is known by the marketing industry and is deliberately used within advertising strategies. I watched a series the other day where one of the characters, who was a car salesman said: “I don’t sell cars, I sell freedom”. As an exercise for yourself, you can look at advertisement and try to see what unrealistic expectation they are trying to create within their viewers – and as a fun challenge within that: try to see how many products apparently will give you passionate sex, lol – advertisements of all kinds of products, from soft drinks, to cars, to perfumes – implicitly play on the desire and urge for sex to sell their products for them. 

So what is it about those wants where we have unrealistic expectations, that we would experience them as a ‘need’?

I’ll continue exploring this topic in my next post.

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Day 8: Consuming Children as Commodities

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to blame economic theorists for treating children like consumption goods or commodities within their theoretic models, while empirical studies actually show that this truly is how parents make their decision in terms of having a child or another child - where children are treated as any other consumption good.

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to realise the implication of this point; that parents plan to consume their children in order to obtain personal satisfaction.

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to realise that a child is not something to be consumed and that the decision of having a child should not rest on the expected satisfaction I'll be able to derive from having a child.

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to realise that having children has always been selfish - to fulfil the parents' life, to gain more satisfaction, to have a feeling of accomplishment, etc - without even considering if you would want to have yourself as a mother or a father - only ever considering my wants, my needs, my desires.

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to realise the craziness of the current economic system where the whole system spins based on individuals attempting to satisfy their wants, needs and desires - up to the point where children are but another way of attaining a sense of fulfillment.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to be abhorred at the idea of child trade, where children are traded like an item on a market - not realising that in the very decision to have a child, a parent does the exact same thing, treating a child like a commodity, where a parent tries to answer the question of how much the child is worth to them and what they're willing to trade in order to have a child.

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to realise that making the decision to have a child in this way, is actually supporting the manifestation of child trade in this world.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to value everything and everyone within my world and the world in general in terms of how much I'm willing to pay for it and how much benefit and personal satisfaction I would be able to obtain from it - always making value-judgments from a self-interested perspective, not realising that life is inherently valuable, independent of me.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to be surprised when the actual experience of having a child is disappointing, while this shouldn't come as a surprise because an expectation was created based on a desire in terms of how well the child would 'quench a thirst' within self and in the same way where if we buy something it is always expected to be 'more' than what the actual experience is of obtaining, using or consuming the good, where we eventually get tired of the item and want to move on to something more exciting - the experience of having children won't correspond to what we had expected.

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to realise that if I make the decision of having a child based on how well the child will satisfy my personal wants, needs and desires, I shouldn't have children in the first place - because the actual experience of having a child will be nothing like what I had expected it to be - yet, contrary to stuff that you buy and get tired of after a while as using or consuming it doesn't provide you with the same amount of satisfaction that it initially did - you can't just toss children in the garbage can or bring them back to the shop for a refund.

I commit myself to the redefinition of the word value, where value is no longer defined in terms of the expected satisfaction, fulfillment and gratification something will yield me, but stands in relation to the value of life itself.

I commit myself to creating a world where the decision to have children will no longer be limited and determined by money.

I commit myself to educating parents and prospective parents so that they may see and understand that children are not just commodities with which to fulfill oneself, but are actual beings that require your support and your assistance to develop themselves as effectively as possible to be able to live a fulfilling life of their own.

I commit myself to show how humanity has accepted and allowed children to become part of the definition of life that has been presented through consumerism as that which is acquired through money as but an external representation of completion / fulfillment / purpose for the individual that give the individual an experience of completion / fulfillment / purpose, where having a child / raising a family has become but part of the consumer's process of the pursuit of happiness which is the pursuit of acquiring goods / things such as a home, a car, a husband / wife, an education, a bank account, a retirement plan, a vacation home, a lifestyle, a social group, so that one can view one's self in comparison with others as having accomplished the 'building of a life' -- where, in this process of the pursuit of happiness as 'building a life', one was so consumed with consuming the pursuit of happiness / building a life that one lost sight of the fact that one brought into this world a living being that had the opportunity to grow into the best possible human it could be that could take responsibility for this world -- an opportunity that was stolen from the child by the parent when the parent passed on the pursuit of happiness / acceptance of the consumerist system to the child.

I commit myself to stop accepting and allowing myself to consume life in my own pursuit of happiness, and stop accepting and allowing everyone else to consume life in the pursuit of happiness.

I commit myself to show how through the media in movies, TV, commercials, life is presented as the pursuit of happiness as the accomplishment of building a life through consumerism and that this presentation / definition of life is used to brainwash humans to occupy themselves with the pursuit of fulfilling a picture in their mind of what life is, to distract them from the abuse that goes on daily in the name of profit for the few.

I commit myself to show how the human allows itself to be brainwashed by the media to occupy itself with feelings of accomplishment and achievement through consumerism because it is too afraid to stand and stop allowing abuse - and to show how the parent then passes on this pattern to the child, producing another consumer engineered by those who abuse life in the name of profit.

I commit myself to value Life instead of the pursuit of accomplishment as it has been presented to me through the media / consumerism as the acquisition of goods.

I commit myself to re-define accomplishment as the creation of a world that is best for all, and to give a world that is best for all to my child so that my child can fulfill its potential as a responsible being that cares for life.

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