Do we need all the things we think we need?

“How many things I can do without!”
Socrates


More than 2000 years ago, while Socrates was walking around the marketplace in Athens, he looked at all the wares on sale, and then he made the remark as quoted above. Today, more than two thousand years later, many people still fail to realise the truth of his observation. You open a catalogue and enter a shop, and being bombarded by all the items displayed, you hardly know where to start in order to satisfy your buying craze. You horde things that you think you need. You (most probably) will later come to realise that you never needed that thing you initially thought you could not live without. How do you come to realise that? Because since you acquired that item, you used it but once or twice.

Do we truly need all the things we think we need? Only when you have lost all of your material possessions, do you completely grasp that you can live without so many unnecessary things. You then rethink the unimportance of the needless things that once seemed so very important. Yes, things do indeed make our lives much easier and so much more pleasurable, and it is nice to have nice things, but unfortunately, too many people become so absorbed by the objects surrounding them that they lose themselves in the process of accumulating these material things. Some people even go as far as finding their happiness in and creating their identities by way of the accumulation of objects.

The French philosopher, René Descartes coined a well-known maxim: “I THINK THEREFORE I AM”. He argued that his existence could be proven by the mere fact that he can think. His maxim, however, has been changed by some people to read: “I BUY, THEREFORE I AM”. It is true that some people find the proof of their existence in their capacity to buy stuff. Your existence does not rely on your capacity to buy. Is our obsession to buy not maybe a result of being caught in the rat race, as depicted in the image I attached? I, for one, can relate with a 17th-century samurai, named master Gennai. He said that only after being stripped from all your earthly possessions, do you have the privilege to possess yourself freely for the rest of your days. The point is, the more you possess, the less you possess yourself. Can you relate to this?

Let possessions not enslave your life. Possessing things is not wrong, but being possessed by things can be the thorn in one’s flesh.


I opened another wholesale catalogue,
Confronted by things I don’t need,
but greed is just a blanket of smog
so Socrates’s advice is valuable, indeed.




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