The Evolution of Economical Obsession - How Greed Consumes Our Culture

In an age where our ego is our life, it's unsurprising that the main drive throughout society is money. Money is what fuels our ego, what allows us to but our extravagant cars and fashionable clothing that, apparently, define our personality. Money is what gives us permission to show the rest of the world that we are 'superior' to our fellow man; or so we've been told, that is. But how did we get to this? How have we 'progressed' from the olden day family orientated attitudes and beliefs of togetherness and preservation to the self-centered, money infatuated values that we hold in modern society?

Let's start from the beginning shall we? From the moment we reach the pre-operational stages of childhood, we are undergoing the 'crucial' training that will allow us to sustain a job and earn the income that will support us for the remainder of our lives. We are dumped in preschools and day-cares from as early as 2 years old to allow us to adjust to the interaction of our fellow toddlers and gradually adapt to the early stages of the education system. From then, we go onto elementary school, where we are learning the skills necessary to survive secondary school, which in turn prepares us for university or further education. The survivors are then handed a degree or certificate and forced to seek employment, but at the end of the day, we are all abruptly thrust out into the workplace to earn what little currency is left untouched by 'the big dogs' of the industrial world. In short, our interest in money sparks at a young age and as we grow, manifests into an overwhelming obsession.

It's not just our innocent, childhood curiosity that is to blame for our infatuation. We all want to feel superior to the everyday man. We buy new clothes and furnish our houses with money we don't have so people can look at us at think, 'Wow, they really know what they're doing with their life, don't they'. Every time someone other than ourself is complimented on materialistic possessions, our ego comes into play. We always want to be better than everyone else. We are not satisfied with being second best. The fact of the matter is, that few seconds of euphoria achieved by trying on your new Ralph Lauren jacket for the first time is infinitely more satisfying than, say, sampling the greatest Italian cuisine or sniffing the best rose. We crave capitalism because it's the only means of escape from the Great Depression that is our lives. We live content in a society ruled by money as opposed to the people because it allows us to feel at ease within ourself... we have become numb to the negligence of nobleness. 

We are never truly happy; our obsession with money is evident of this. We suffer delusions of self-satisfaction because it's the only thing that separates us from insanity. By creating the illusion of happiness, we fill the emptiness inside accumulated by years of neglect and subliminal self-loathing. This is why we shop, drink and gamble.

See Also: Why we use drugs.

See Also: Why we lie.

Perhaps our economical obsession is just a brief phase in the course of humanities' evolution. After all, we are the only species that exhibits traits of greed and self-centered behavior. Sure, some animals consume more food than they may need and others may attract more sexual partners than necessary, but these traits would be acknowledged as gluttony at most! Furthermore, these attitudes towards wealth were far less prominent a few hundreds years ago. In Elizabethan times, it was a simple matter of the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. Society was divided into the working class and the aristocrats. I could divulge an entire blog post dedicated to the 'classless society' we live in (in fact, I already have), but we'd be digressing from the main point if I were to do so in this article. 

No matter how far our fetish for fortune evolves, we will never be satisfied. The simple fact alone that we are no happier than we were during the mid-20th century, despite the huge increase in personal wealth. It seems people have been trying to buy their own happiness and they are finding out the hard way that this act is impossible. Finally, let me end on a quote by the political theorist, Clive Hamilton, from his economical eudaimonistic, the Growth Fetish: 'People buy things they don't need, with money they don't have, to impress people they don't like'... There; I think that quite adequately sums up the article, don't you?


As always, keep your mind open and your legs closed.
xoxo
Gossip Brad

Common Sense: How Logical Thinking is Vanishing From Society

"There is nothing more uncommon than common sense."

Common sense has the power to dictate our every thought. It has the ability to overthrow all desire and abandon all outside reason; it is what keeps us from making an absolute fool of ourself. At the end of the day, common sense is what tells us that walking across the highway will result in you being splattered across grandma's window screen and that shoving your head in a fire will cause a similar effect to that of the end scene in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

How I Feel When Reading Certain Facebook Statuses

But people, particularly in more recent times, have abused this power. Obviously, to said people, one persons completely irrational opinion is more reasonable than logic. There are so many ways I can approach this post, but in the interest of not caring about what you guys think, I'll keep it simple.

First let's start with chain mails; the only form of fictional documentation where you can receive riches or suffer a punishment simply by not sending it on to others. Contrary to belief, chain mails actually existed long before the internet, but you know what, you can look that up yourself if you're interested, I'm not your friggen history teacher. Anyway, most people that recieve an email explaining that if they don't forward it to all their contacts that they'll be destined to a life of misery can happily laugh it off and send it to their recycling bin... however there are others out there who are not in the same mindset. Now, don't get me wrong, I used to send chain emails too... you know, when I was 11. What drives someone to send one of these? How is it possible to come to the conclusion that if you don't forward a story about how little Suzie fell down a well and now attempts to redeem herself and get a college diploma (or something like that) then you'll be condemning her failure? Why are these people just abandoning all common sense?! I can sit and discuss how ridiculous chain mails are all day, but I don't wish to give them the satisfaction of dedicating an entire blog post to them, so I'll forward on (see what I did there... mmm, screw you all.)

Being an avid Facebook user (Facebooker? Facebookist? Facebookman? I don't know), I see viral trends and memes come and ago faster than Kim Kardashian's marriage and one of the more popular 

ideologies is how liking a photo will somehow cure cancer or save a starving child in Africa. The 'like if you remember these' photos are bad enough, but the 'like in three seconds if you're against child abuse'. I wonder what possesses someone to think to themselves, 'Let's like this photo to show people I'm against abuse!' That's just common sense, isn't it?! You're not supposed to like child abuse in the first place, there's not reason to announce it to the whole goddamn internet! I've even seen an incline in 'For every like, Facebook will donate $1 to this dying girl'. ARE YOU SERIOUS?! WHY WOULD YOU THINK THAT LIKING A FACEBOOK PHOTO WILL SOMEHOW BENEFIT I DYING CHILD?! This is how I imagine the way those peoples minds function, as told through a narrative.

A doctor walks in the room, explaining to a girls crying mother that her daughter will not survive the night. The mother begins to sob even harder. 'Isn't there any thing you can do?!' She cries. 

'Well', the doctor leans towards the mother and whispers, 'I do like Facebook pictures... so I'll make you a deal. If you can get 1000 likes on a picture of your daughter... I'll see if I can make some... arrangements.' 

4 hours later, the doctor confronts the mother and asks how many likes the photo has recieved.

'Only 197..' the mum whimpers.

'NOT GOOD ENOUGH!' the doctor yells.

'YOU ANIMAL!' the mother sobs

'1000 LIKES IN THE NEXT 5 HOURS OR THE GIRL GETS IT!'

What I'm trying to say is liking a photo does nothing. Get that through your head. It doesn't matter if 10 people like it or 10 million people like it, it's not going to make a scrap of difference.

The main point of this post is to emphasize the rapid decline of common sense in recent times and I think I have discovered the cause... the internet. I use the internet everyday and nonetheless I find it one of the most brilliant and useful form of technology, I just believe that it's power is being abused and mankind is suffering the consequences. I don't necessarily feel it's making humanity in general any stupider but there's no doubt that it's having a detrimental effect on he perception of logic. Before Google, before Facebook, before the internet, mankind had to depend on itself. Viral memes was word of mouth; logical information was found in written print, not on Wikipedia. There was more control of what was being imprinted into the minds of the public and those lower on the social hierarchy (where, in modern times, false information is abundant) had little to no control of spreading information whatsoever. To put it shortly, the spread of information was limited and even when something did slip through the cracks, word of mouth only allowed it to be extended onto a few people at a time. Nowadays, the internet allows anything to escalate. With blogging sites such as these, everyones opinions can be accessed by the entire modern world within seconds and whilst that is usually quite harmless, the power of the written word can be very dangerous.

There's so much I want to talk about regarding common sense. I haven't even began to elaborate the my thoughts on superstitions and how inconceivable that the relative position of the planets and stars could have a special deep significance that exclusively applies to people who believe in 'horoscopes', but what are you going to do I guess.

Keep your mind open and your legs closed,

xoxo Gossip Brad.