Does Wealth Bring Happiness or Just Superficial Satisfaction?
Advertisements pursue you everywhere, showing you happy people, as if whispering: You can enjoy this, and this, and this. Is happiness found at the shopping mall? A person looks at others: one opened another small business, another built a chain of stores, and a third created an international empire. Does wealth bring happiness?
In our development, we have reached a state where money has become the measure of everything, “How much is this worth?” Today, organs are sold, children are sold, and human beings are sold. Everything has a price. There is almost nothing and no one that cannot be bought in some way. It was never like this to such an extent. In the past, science and art still had a value above money. There were scientists who refused to sell themselves for financial gain and penniless artists who practically painted with their own blood.
Today, our development has brought us to a state where almost anything can be bought with money: food, sex, family, honor, control, knowledge. As a result, people are measured according to how much they have in the bank. I look at someone and ask: How much are they worth? What car do they drive? What do they wear? What jewelry do they have? And so on. People speak through money, making sure others understand how much they are worth. At the same time, an enormous advertising machine has developed that tells us what we should buy in order to feel good, in order to be happy.
The problem is that whatever we manage to attain eventually stops making us feel good. We hoped so much that something would make us happy, and here it comes, great joy! Then suddenly, it is over, as though it had never happened. And once again there are new goals, new objectives, more running, investments, and dreams. Here it comes, great joy again! And suddenly, once again, it is over. Sometimes, a certain feeling of exhaustion begins to surface. Where is this constant pursuit of enjoyment that slips through our fingers time and again leading us?
When do we feel alive? It is when we want something, when we lack something, when we have a great deficiency for it. Someone who wants nothing is, in a sense, alive but dead inside. Yet even if you have a great desire for something, after attaining it and perhaps feeling on top of the world, the feeling of happiness gradually fades away.
This pattern, which repeats itself again and again, tells us the following: Whatever you attain, the very act of attaining it extinguishes your yearning for it, your feeling of deficiency toward it. You no longer lack it, and therefore the pleasure you receive from it disappears. How can we escape this loop? How can we preserve two opposites simultaneously, a deficiency for something while ensuring that attaining it does not extinguish our yearning for it? This is the secret of life.
It turns out that no one can discover the answer to this secret alone, no matter how deeply they search within themselves or how many dollars and possessions they accumulate. The answer is hidden between us, in the new connections we must learn to build with one another. Enormous, truly infinite sources of happiness are hidden within our harmonious connection with one another.
How does this work? Perfect pleasure, or ultimate happiness, must contain two conditions: I want something and I receive it, yet the fulfillment does not extinguish the desire. These two opposites must exist together, yearning and enjoyment, deficiency and fulfillment. Such a state is possible only if I am harmoniously connected with others. I become inspired by what they desire, their desire becomes my own, and I enjoy what they enjoy. I can then arrange myself so that deficiency and fulfillment exist together without extinguishing one another.
This depends on developing an attitude of love toward others. Only when we become included in others can we continually renew our desires and continually renew our fulfillments. The moment we attain this, we reach a special point at which it becomes possible to become endlessly happier and happier. We can reach this point on the condition that we feel connected to others through love and attain happiness together with them. This is how we reach the perfect state.
As long as we remain distant from one another, each of us buried in our own money, affairs, ambitions, and achievements, separated and disconnected, we have no chance of enjoying anything for long. As a human species, we are now approaching this conclusion at the end of thousands of years of development. Precisely in this age of abundance, when from morning until night our minds are flooded with advertisements telling us which purchase will finally make us truly happy, the whole world has become one interconnected global village.
This comes to hint to us that we too need to become connected, not only through the Internet, but primarily through each other's hearts, because within this inner network of connection between us lies the secret of life.
Based on "New Life 222 – Wealth and Happiness" with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.