Happiness Becomes Unattainable When People Forget What it Means

In America it's common to see people seeking happiness through acquisition since it's important to own a house but it's even more important to own the biggest house.  Most important of all is to ensure everyone possible knows you have the biggest house anywhere.

That continues through the entire consumerist roster whose one prevailing characteristic is it's good to get something but it's even better to get more of it.

We can work the litany about the Demonic Capitalist/Consumerist culture but you have heard it already and we only need to observe the phenomenon.  There's the further observation the happiness of the nation is predicated on the material happiness of the consumers since there is careful reporting on whether the consumers are spending or holding back.


But, you and I, we've been through that, right?


I don't know that any of us is trying to accumulate anything except experience while in multiple cases we're seeking to get rid of the stuff we have gathered.  Assuming there was ever real happiness in the acquisitions, it's not there now.  The point in mentioning that is any happiness in acquisition is, almost by definition, transient.

Yogi:  no-one really owns anything since such a concept requires immortality to be more than a temporary and artificial construct

Ed:  temporary tenant or no, it's better to have the thing

Possibly ... until you have to fix it, paint it, or pay the jacked-up real estate taxes they're using to force you out of it when you get older.


Yesterday there was the case study in Lost Children with the fellow commuting six hours ever day to work because 'it lets me get the things I want.'  There's no apparent recognition of the permanent loss of those six hours and only to acquire a temporary thing.  Put another way, those six hours for a five-day work week add to sixty days per year lost just to commuting.  The Lost Child may be able to afford that yacht now but how much time do you suppose he will be able to spend on it.

Life Lost Annually in Days = (6 * 5 * 4 * 12) / 24

It's nearly a satire of obsessive materialism but it becomes a tragedy when we see it doesn't work.  They aren't happy and you can look at any number of measures to validate that (e.g. suicide rates, etc).

Yogi:  happiness is a pic-a-nic basket

Booboo:  you are so right, Yogi

Yogi:  the happiest time is with nothing ... so long as you have a pic-a-nic basket

You know he's right since some of the most beautiful moments in your life are likely on some kind of picnic with your devotchka and you look all sweet and smiley at each other but it's real and not one thing is required except you and her.

Yogi:  you and her and a pic-a-nic basket

That's right, Yogi.


If this bears any resemblance to blowing joints on the lawn at Riverbend while Stevie Ray played his last show ... well ... it's deliberate.  The cat had gone straight and had fallen so mad in love he was radiating moonbeams into the sky.