I have a wish to never drive or sit in a limousine. It surely sounds absurd or epic or perhaps lunatic, but to be honest, the answer to this question is as simple as the title of this blog. I will quote Aristotle here, who once said that there are thousands of things in this world that I don’t need.
Today, the whole world is about media and information technology. They are loaded with advertisements trying to convert our needs into wants; and thus making us the most miserable creature on earth.
The miserable and unsatisfied expression on the face of a homeless man can also be seen on faces of billion dollar gurus of “corporatocracy”.
This rising misery within all of us is mainly because we are taught and fed with lies of not-needed-wants daily. During my professional education, none of my teachers were impressed with lives and living styles of Prophet PBUH, Edhi, Rumi, Bhudda, Kafka, Tolstoy, Mansur, etc. All were fans of Steve Jobs, Gates, Mittal, Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffet. We were mostly taught how to make money, and never about spirituality. We were taught to avail opportunities, without moral or ethical considerations.
We sometimes run into someone different during life moments. It is said that we can have tens of teachers but only 3 to 4 mentors. One of my mentors, who happened to be the only spiritual teacher in my professional education, focused more on teachings of Ibn-e-Khaldun, Karl Marx and sufism. Being a teacher of a professional business course, he never emphasized on making money, accumulating furniture, carrying handheld devices, buying cars, attires, formalities, or being artificially smart and unbeaten by plea.
But, with around forty materialistic teachers and one spiritualistic, I turned out to be more of a machine. The biggest problem that Pakistan, perhaps the whole world, is currently facing is the problem of being someone else; like being famous without doing anything, having heavy bank balance without working physically and being recognized for someone else’s work. Unfortunately.
Answer to this dilemma is simple: having patience, being conscientious, living within limits, understanding the cycle of life, reading regularly…
We need to shift focus. There are beggars and there are advertisements on the billboards at a road signal.
We simply have to change the seeing and thinking attitude and change in preferences will follow.
I have been in problem that I have mentioned above, but I am not the solution that I have described above. I am working on it. You have to pin your own bubble of wants yourself. Only then you will realize there are billions of things in this world you don’t need.