By Khyati Sinha
Materialism defined by google is “a tendency to consider material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values.”
In today’s day and age, everything else other than humans themselves are given importance. Designer branded expensive clothes, shoes, money, luxury is what the goal is. Success is now defined as the ability to possess a lot of luxury items and live lavishly rather than attain nirvana or peace. According to old scriptures and the Eastern philosophy, the emotional sense of being was more important.
Moreover the story, “He said it with Arsenic” written by Ruskin Bond shows how William Jones is awfully uncaring when it comes to even his family and all he cares about is his possessions. Materialism is depicted in the story when he goes to the extent of killing his own family only to get some wealth with which he can live off of.
The cruelty about materialism is that it creates a continuous process and there is no going back.
Everyone starts wanting more and more and then the comparison of possession starts due to which the race never stops.
Now the question that arises is, if there is such a thing as good materialism or is it just plain bad? Nowadays if people want to blame corruption they merely blame the attachment that we have to material things.
At a very realistic level, we as humans are ourselves caught up in the question of whether we should let ourselves be attached to material things or be spiritual with next to no possession?
The truth is the closest thing to being spiritual is religion and if you notice religion itself attaches itself to materialistic possessions be it shrines, temples, statues, photos, posters, and paintings.
This shows that in this day and age how it is so confusing to be one or the other. There is no one fully materialistic or spiritual as it is not possible.
This is the terrible mistake we make: allowing ourselves to believe that having more money and more things improve our well-being, an illusion not only possessed in the pictures by those poor deluded individuals, but by almost every member of nearly every government. A recipe for mass unhappiness is worldly ambition, material aspiration, perpetual development.
