|
The Idea
I am not against capitalism. In fact, this is perhaps the best model available today to run the world.
However, there are severe limitations of capitalism that significantly affect the quality of our lives.
Capitalism perhaps is the only model available that generates more wealth from the existing wealth. It sounds great right?
In the end, we all need some level of material affluence to live a certain standard of living.
But often the capitalistic mindset (especially the hyper one) creates more problems in living a content life.
To put simply, capitalism teaches us to instrumentalize every resource that we have, our time, skills, etc. in order to generate more profit in the future.
Think carefully and you will realize what is extremely wrong with a hyper-capitalistic mindset.
If you do everything now with the hope of getting returns in the future, then your mind must be on the future. You are never really in this moment.
You see why the lives of many rich people are miserable. They are very good at utilizing their time and money for the purpose of generating more wealth for themselves; that's the definition of success in a capitalistic world.
But in focusing so hard on utilizing their time, they end up treating their life in the present moment as nothing but a vehicle in which to travel to the future state of happiness.
It is somewhat like a mirage. You think it's there in the future. But once you reach there, it seems again a little in the future.
Most of us nowadays live this kind of life to some extent. We are working hard with the hope to make out future better. But in doing that, we end up killing meaning from our present moments.
To be honest, it is also hard to remain in the present. Our minds constantly take us to our past or our future.
Nonetheless, all of us could do a few basic mindset changes to keep our monkey minds from diverting.
One of the easiest things is perhaps to stop treating the present time, the now as a vehicle to reach to the future.
No matter what your end goal is at this point in life, chances are it will again change once you reach there.
That does not mean we should stop setting goals or pursuing our future. We must strive for a better future but perhaps without sacrificing the meaning of this present moment.
There is a famous story of a fisherman you might have heard of.
There was once a fisherman who told a businessman in a suit tie (from a city) that he works only for 4-5 hours per day and spends most of his time playing in the sun with his friends and enjoying food with his close ones.
Astonished by the Fisherman's approach to time management, the businessman offered him unsolicited advice: if the fisherman worked harder, he explained, he could invest the profits in a bigger fleet of boats, pay others to do the fishing, make millions, and retire early.
'And what would I do then' asked the fisherman.
'Ah, well, then, you could spend your days playing in sun with your friends and enjoying food with your closed ones.'
'Isn't that is what I am doing right now' said the fisherman.
A simple yet profound story.
Don't sacrifice your life in order to make a living.
|
