Interesting article in the Guardian:
My view is that a certain amount of hardship and striving is essential to keep us motivated and stimulated and therefore happy. When your standard of living means you can have all the cars and plasma screens and bling that you want, your whole reason for living can vanish like a mirage leaving you with the realisation that your life is empty and you just own a lot of stuff that in the big scheme of things has no value. It's been shown that lottery winners are no happier after a few months of their win, and quite often are much less happy because they've given up their old lifestyle and with it, their more realistic expectations and aspirations. It reminds me of when I was a kid and I had to save every penny to buy an expensive record from my local vinyl emporium a few times a year and boy, did I treasure them and squeeze out every last bit of enjoyment from them. Nowadays I can get just about any album I want for peanuts on ebay and so I don't really appreciate them (even though I go on buying them, desperately trying to compensate for all those years of coveting the unaffordable) and I kind of wish I could get back that excitement and enjoyment that I had during the lean years... To be honest I don't have much sympathy for majority of people that hit the mall every weekend like a swarm of locusts and then wonder why their self-centred consumerist lifestyles don't make them happy. Also I think it's a fact of life that no matter what your circumstances you can never avoid a certain amount of unhappiness or misery (into every life a little rain must fall etc.) so at least that's keeps us from getting too above ourselves - though it seems that some people think they're suffering from mental illness just because they're not as happy as they erroneously think they deserve to be in the 21st century....
that's the world put to rights again
