The whole of consumerism is based on us wanting the next thing rather than the present thing we already have. This is an almost perfect recipe for unhappiness.
It sometimes feels as if we have temporarily solved the problem of scarcity and replaced it with the problem of excess.
We might have to, sometimes, be brave enough to switch the screens off in order to switch ourselves back on. To disconnect in order to reconnect.
To see the act of learning as something not for its own sake but because of what it will get you reduces the wonder of humanity. We are thinking, feeling, art-making, knowledge-hungry, marvellous animals, who understand ourselves and our world through the act of learning. It is an end in itself. It has far more to offer than the things it lets us write on application forms. It is a way to love living right now.
KURT VONNEGUT SAID, decades before anyone had an Instagram account, that ‘we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful who we pretend to be’.
As Montaigne put it, ‘He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.’
The Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh writes in The Art of Power that while ‘many people think excitement is happiness’, actually ‘when you are excited you are not peaceful. True happiness is based on peace.’
Maybe the point of life is to give up certainty and to embrace life’s beautiful uncertainty.
When anger trawls the internet, Looking for a hook; It’s time to disconnect, And go and read a book.
‘When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence,’ taught the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti.