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 HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?
Hungering For God In An Affluent Culture

FAT WALLETS, EMPTY LIVES

Why is it that in the face of unprecedented prosperity, so many of us feel discontented?

This is especially evident in rich countries, but it is also true in poor countries among those who have managed to attain some measure of wealth. Everywhere it is clear that material advantages can capture the heart.

What they cannot do is nourish the soul.

Our culture spreads before us a dazzling array of things to buy and   things to do. This causes most of us to experience and ever-rising level of expectations. Rising expectations expand our perceptions of what we need. We see things and want them, and before long we feel that we need them.

Our expectations expand partly because new or improved products and services – many of them quite useful – become available, and partly because people around us are buying them.

 Advertising plays a big role.

We are “conditioned to be dissatisfied cravers rather than appreciators of the goods of the earth. Marketers, who persuade people to buy, cultivate the craving for new and exciting things.

Today the U.S. marketing industry alone spends several times as much money on advertising as the total income of the poorest 1,000,000,000 (one billon) people on earth.

Their abject poverty stands in striking contrast to the growing affluence in the rich countries of the world.

Our expectations, like floodwaters, keep rising. To keep up, we work longer hours, on average, to lift our household income so we can but things that we may not really need.

Many of us have found that income gains were offset by harried lives and less time with family and friends.

But frantic lives and rising expectations are not the only reasons for our discontent. Consider the increasing amounts of sex, violence and foul language in the advertising media and in real life. There is a huge market for these elements, and in exploiting it people not only make money, but shape the culture in which we live.

We are lowering the bar on what passes for acceptable behaviour in our society, and this impacts each of our lives in the form of crime, divorce,  lack of respect for authority and much more.

 Many people wonder if this is the price that we will pay for prosperity. Is moral decay the outcome!

(To be continued)