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There’s happiness in having less. That’s something we don’t hear often, or at all these days.
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Happiness seems to be defined by being in a state of not wanting more than what we have - feeling complete as is. We rarely feel this way. We constantly want more, more than others.
“Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have”
Tyler Durden said it best in the film Fight Club: “The things you own end up owning you.”
Minimalists are people who know what’s truly necessary for them versus what they may want for the sake of appearance.
According to 2014 data, 306 hours of video content are uploaded to YouTube, 433,000 Tweets are posted on Twitter, and 50,000 apps are downloaded from the App Store every minute.
On the other side, human beings are like fifty-thousand-year-old pieces of hardware.
Technology allows us to have multiple tools at our fingertips; this enables us to streamline what we need—if we can restrain ourselves to use it appropriately. After all, who uses their phone mostly, and just, to make phone calls? We rarely do—it’s now an everything device.
For a moment, things seem fine as we reach our next goal. However, further down the road, hopelessness and a craving for more and novelty arise again. Whether it’s a job, an object, or a phase in our life, this is the cycle that governs us.
We eventually get used to the new state where our wishes have been fulfilled. We start taking those things for granted, and soon we grow tired of what we have.
Our stimuli are short-lived.
Andre Agassi, former world number one tennis player, learned that the joy of victory isn’t nearly as strong as the despair of defeat. Those happy feelings fade within hours.
No matter how much you spend on that ring, you aren’t going to feel ten times happier with the ten-times-more-expensive ring. You’ll feel about the same. There’s no limit to how expensive things can be, but there are set limits to our emotions. There’s only so much we can feel.
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A £100,000 sports car will not have ten times the speed of a £10,000 compact car, and the law wouldn’t allow it anyway. A £20,000 Apple Watch won’t have fifty times the battery life of a £400 Apple Watch, and it won’t have fifty times the processing speed either.
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“Why do we own so many things when we don’t need them? What is their purpose? I think the answer is quite clear: we’re desperate to convey our own worth, our own value to others. We use objects to tell people just how valuable we are.”