Sustainability

Happiness comes from within.  It is a perspective that is carried in the mind at every waking moment.  You will not find any lasting happiness in the outside world that is separate from your own inner perceptions.  This is because the outside world only reflects your internal point of view, your internal perspective.

If you are not happy on the inside, you will never find happiness on the outside.  Yet today, it is common to see people seek happiness on the outside without having done this inner work.  They seek some sort of lasting fix from something out there, somewhere.  They expect the next TV show, consumer gadget, website click or paid-for experience to provide some happiness, even when it never does.

The urge to find happiness on the outside leads to addiction and delusion.  It is possible to be addicted to anything in this world, even pain.  The root of all addiction is simply the urge to find pleasurable stimulation, to cover over the emptiness felt on the inside.  It is not possible to treat addiction without addressing this very emptiness — you have to teach the addict how to create happiness first, then the addiction will go away, naturally.

And it is possible to be deluded about anything.  So many people today are so obsessed with their religion, with their politics, with their ideas about how the world must be.  They cling to some belief system to interpret their emptiness and sense of existential anguish, to give it meaning, to give it some dignity  This is a very human thing to do, but no matter how much you dress up the empty void inside, it remains an empty void.  The fundamentalists of religion, of politics, even of science — those who refuse to question — have made this world a very difficult place for the rest of us.

I want to point out that our entire economic system today — consumerist corporate capitalism — is itself a product and reflection of this attitude that we can find happiness on the outside without doing the self-inquiry and personal work necessary to make ourselves happy on the inside.

Indeed, the entire premise of our society is that happiness can be purchased.  It doesn’t matter what it is you purchase, as long as you are purchasing something.  You could be buying a flat-screen TV, or a pet, or a year supply of Prozac.   In each instance, we make the assumption that the purchase itself leads to happiness.  That moment when cash exchanges hands, when units of money are swapped for some consumer experience or consumer item: this is the sacred moment of our society, worshipped as the sum total of human civilization.

If you want to understand the damage cause by this philosophy, all you need to do is look at the waste caused by consumerism.  Consumerism and waste go hand in hand.  Humanity has generated more waste on this planet in the last 200 years than in the last 200,000 years.  Thanks to consumerism, we have littered the world with our plastics, which scientists say carry a toxic poison.  We have created so-called “dead zones” in the ocean where life can no longer exist.  An entire island of trash, twice the size of Texas, floats between San Francisco and Hawaii.

Our need for cheap energy to fuel non-stop consumer acquisition threatens the habitability of life on this planet.  Fossil fuel emissions, air pollution, spent nuclear energy — all these things are produced because we give short shrift to the consequences of waste.  We prefer to have the luxury of cheap energy and fast cars even if it means poisoning the air quality and melting the ice caps.  There are so many evils associated with these waste products — health evils such as cancer and asthma, as well as environmental evils such as climate change — yet today, these evils are ignored.

Consumerism generates internal waste as well.  In addition to the physical garbage produced by consumerism, we accumulate mental garbage in our minds.  Short attention spans, fix-it-now attitudes about life, seeing people as worthy of respect only if they look like the people we see on TV: these are the types of mental waste we produce when we dedicate our lives to consumerism.

So we live in a world where we are told that buying things on the outside will soothe the inner void on the inside.  But this never happens.  Instead, all we end up doing is creating and living in our own waste.  Can you see how destructive this logic is, how truly brainwashed we must be to buy into the consumerist point of view?  We are so brainwashed that we cannot stop our behaviors even when they are toxic to the planet and to ourselves — even when we recognize the damage we are causing.

But let us look on the bright side.  The bright side is that more and more people are waking up to the reality that consumerism is a poison that prevents us from being happy.  More and more people are taking a holistic approach to the problems of our society — the problems of happiness, the problems of health, the problems of waste and climate change — and seeing that these problems are all linked together, linked to the very basic desire to find contentment.

Today, it is possible to talk of a world based on sustainability, and not consumerism.

What is sustainability?  Sustainability is a way of life that asks us to cultivate happiness from that which we have, instead of expecting happiness to come from that which we can purchase.

A sustainable world will look very different than a world based on consumer acquisition.

A sustainable world begins in our own minds.  Sustainability says, “what I have is enough,” and uses that foundation as a basis to do the inner work necessary to cultivate happiness.  Instead of seeing the world as a vast resource to be exploited, the attitude of sustainability seeks to live in harmony with the world and minimize human impact in order to preserve it for future generations.

A sustainable world will not be focused on the production of new consumer items.  Today, we all work to get rich, so that we can purchase things.  In a sustainable world, we will not work to get rich, but to maintain our essentials so that we can have the free time to cultivate happiness.

A sustainable world will honor mental and physical health.  Today, there are a variety of diseases that accrue due to our unhealthy lifestyle, diseases of the mind as well as diseases of the body.  Because we sit for so many hours of the day, we get heart disease later in life, and we develop cancers due to the poisons we put in the air and the earth.  Because we are constantly looking for happiness in consumer acquisition, we develop addictive and delusional traits that lead to psychosis and greater feelings of unhappiness.  A sustainable world will ask us to confront these ills, and heal them.

A sustainable world will ask us to take individual responsibility for our every day needs.  In a sustainable world, we will have to take a hand in guaranteeing our shelter, our food supply, our modes of transportation.  We will have to work with our friends and neighbors to ensure that those common necessities of life are shared by everyone, so that all can pursue their happiness in the way they see fit.

A sustainable world will have a different attitude towards technology.  We won’t use technology as a stand-in for human happiness, but we will use it as a tool in making our lives easier.

A sustainable world will be a world of peace.  Our current attitudes about acquisition play themselves out on the world stage this very moment.  What are the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, if nothing other than America’s desire to acquire stable energy supplies and greater power in this world?  No, we don’t need to acquire any of those things.  We can do with what we have.  Ninety-nine percent of the wars in this world result from a desire to acquire resources from another.  When we adopt an attitude of sustainability, we will come to see war as the disrespect that it really is, both to its victims and to ourselves.

A sustainable world is a world based on the wisdom that we cannot acquire happiness.  Happiness comes about through cultivation of the soul, through self-examination, by looking at our lives and making constant improvements so that we can feel ever closer to the grand consciousness which permeates all of existence.  If we can adopt this attitude internally, then the world will reflect this attitude as well.

The problems of the world today are the problems of unhappiness.  We are all just looking to be happy.  There is nothing wrong with this desire, but we should be critical of the methods we use to obtain happiness.  And we must discard those methods that do not in fact bring us happiness, ways of life like consumerism.

We can fix a lot of the problems of the world today with a new attitude: an attitude of sustainability.  It is a difficult thing to examine this collective way of life called consumerism which we live day-in and day-out, without thought of any alternative.  But it is a way of life that is killing us, and killing the planet, and prevents us from being happy.  It is time to think of another way.

What do you have to lose in this endeavor, other than your own misery?

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 5th, 2008 at 12:53 pm and is filed under A Changing Planet, Alternative Living, Climate Change, Freedom and Spiritualism, Resource Depletion, Social Alienation and tagged with happiness, having enough, sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.