We don't need bigger cars or fancier clothes. We need self-respect, identity, community, love, variety, beauty, challenge and a purpose in living that is greater than material accumulation.
It's funny, I probably have 500 pairs of shoes - all these sneakers or whatever that I've collected - but when push comes to shove, I always end up wearing the same two or three pairs.
However widely, or equally, or "fairly", it may be distributed, no general increase of the community's wealth can make any approach to satiating this need, the ground of which is the desire of every one to excel everyone else in the accumulation of goods.
Don't imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you.
Sometimes groups and their material can get overbloated.
I seem to find different material every four to six months and I frequently forget it which is a shame because it would be nice to have a bigger library.
For the structure that we raise, Time is with materials filled; Our to-days and yesterdays Are the blocks with which we build.
This is my life, I think. I am an accumulation of objects.
For several centuries Western civilization has had a drive for material accumulation, continual extensions of economic power, termed 'progress'...The longing for growth is not wrong. The nub of the problem is how to flip over, as in jujitsu, the magnificent growth energy of modern civilization into a nonacquisitive search for deeper knowledge of self and nature.
