More Isn't the Answer

More Isn’t the Answer
“What I want is what I've not got, but what I need is all around me.”
–Dave Matthews

The pursuit for more is akin to watching a dog chasing its tail. Have you noticed that it never quite reaches it? More is always just out of reach. The drive for more becomes a self-defeating prophecy, because more is not more fulfilling. But how many people would agree with you if you said that? It is almost like saying that 2 + 2 does not equal four. We have all been taught as young children that more has to be more, and more is always better than less, right?
Materialism has become the new mantra of our economy. Consumer spending comprises up to 70% of the GDP of the United States. After 9/11, President Bush recommended that people go out and buy things to show that they had confidence in the American way of life. “Shopping therapy” has become an everyday phrase. Little wonder that the average American household owes $15,587 in credit card debt.
What most of us have not realized is that our burning internal desire for more comes at a cost.
An emotional, physical, and spiritual cost. We have purchased all this stuff with the belief that more stuff would give us more fulfillment, more purpose, and we would feel more alive. There is a term for this: affluenza, (n.): a social condition that affects a society because of the elevated number of individuals striving to be wealthy. People within the society feel that success is only determined by how much money and prestige a person has.
Our burning internal desire for more comes at a cost. We have purchased
with the belief that more stuff would give us more fulfillment,
more purpose and we would feel more alive.

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

The naked truth is that this “success” only fills up your garage with more stuff and indebts you to monthly payments that you can barely afford. Perhaps that’s when you might take on a second job to pay the bills, and then you finally start to clean up your credit card debt. But you park your car outside your garage because there isn't any room for it, and you begin to wonder: what went wrong?
Apparently, more was not the answer; more turned out to be the problem. And more has a very insidious, frightening way of taking over your life.
So how do you untangle the mass of stuff you have created? How do you prove to yourself and to others that less is more? I wrote a book about this, “The Insidious Lies of More", it is available on Kindle. It is the story of my own journey from more to less; downsizing and downshifting into a new emotional freedom from stuff. I share this in the hopes that it will provoke you into considering your own mentality and your way of life. Are you happy? Are you satisfied? Will you ever be? Do you want to be?
Your life is in your own hands. It’s not in the stuff you have, it’s not in the prestige you have bought, and it’s not in the garage you can’t even fit yourself into anymore. It’s inside of you.
Do you know where to look?