To make it worse, the pharmaceutical companies in conjunction with your local doctor have conspired to convince many of you that your sadness and despair is not self created. You have a condition. A condition that must be medicated.
Even more despicable is the concept that your children have a condition. Is your child overactive? Unable to focus? They should be medicated and you should be medicated in order to deal with the trauma of medicating your child.
While mental illness is a serious and debilitating condition, we are all being diagnosed with some mental condition out of all proportion to the real percentage of people who legitimately suffer. It does, however, give a convenient excuse for many people to not take responsibility for their own lives.
Society trains us that our blind consumption will make us all happy. And I'm not just talking about buying consumer goods. The norms around us dictate that your children and your marriage are also consumer goods that you should buy into. Marriage is a big one, because marriage leads us down the path to buying big ticket items.
Marriage is not just a holy institution, it is also a means to buy into the large scale consumption of goods, like houses and cars.
After that comes kids.
And of course more consumption of goods. I am always amazed by how the saturation of consumer products goes along with having children. I see these befuddled parents all the time on the street. They have so much crap, that they need a sport ute, which they obediently purchased. You don't need all that crap. Watch this loving parent I filmed in Ghana. Looks to me like she is taking care of her child just fine, without much of the must have bling. And I'm pretty sure that her life is far more arduous than yours or mine.
By all means, get married and have kids. But do you really need all the consumer goods attached?
The real reason that many of us are unhappy is that we've bought into the idea that happiness is connected to consumption and that if our blind consumption isn't making us happy it is because we have a condition that can be cured by consuming pills. Which is just more consumption.
I've got some advice that has worked for me, and it might work for you. Happiness is connected to connnectedness with your fellow human beings.
And that kind of connectedness is not available in any store.
http://goyestoeverything.com
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