Americans; we're hungry. There is no other way to put it. We hunt for the next new product to buy. We live for the next time a new blockbuster movie comes out. We wait in line for hours hoping to get our hands on the next video game system. “Fourteen million Americans use illegal drugs, twelve million Americans are heavy drinkers, and sixty million are hooked on tobacco. And Five million can't stop gambling away income and savings. And at least ten million can't stop buying more stuff”.
We're constantly searching for something to fill us up, something to help us feel more complete. We are all born with an inherent need for something, but we don't necessarily understand what it is. Material things will never fill this void. No matter how much entertainment we exalt or food we eat, these things can never replace the things that we really lack. Love, hope, faith, and passion are all powerful values that cannot be bought. As we continue to play with our unlimited stock of stuff, our emotional lives have been slowly slipping away from us.
Where's the flame that burned in us when we were children? The fire that drove us to attain an abundance of goals has been dimmed to a small candle that glows just strong enough to get us thought the day. The flame of ambition burned so bright when we were children. A child accomplishes more in it's first few years of life than it does in it's last fifty years. It learns to crawl, but is not satisfied. It immediately sets a new goal for itself, walking. Once it takes it's first few steps, it falls, picks itself up, and tries again. Older, more mature people don't do this. Some just settle for what they have and never even try for something better.
Others try to accomplish something greater, but when they fall, they lay on the ground, waiting for someone else to pick them up. Children have the ability to see things for what they are. They're not naïve; they just look at the world with their eyes open. They haven't been influenced or manipulated yet, so life is clearer. At a certain point in our growing up, the world tells us that we need to conform to society's way of thinking. So aspirations turn into mere daydreams and higher ambitions are replaced by simple goals, like buying a new television set. We're so distracted by all the electronic noise in the culture that we don't strive for anything better. We quit growing. We quit trying. It's just easier to sulk in our pits of despair.
It's a bubbling cauldron of such traits as anxiety, loneliness, and low self-esteem”. When we fail to achieve our goals we fall into an apathetic state of depression. Failure makes us feel empty. The feeling of failure is naturally countered by feeling of success, but instead of striving for success, we counter our disappointment with false solutions that don't deal with the problems You don't feel good about the way you look so you drown your sorrow in ice cream. You didn't get the promotion you wanted so, instead of trying harder, you go to a movie to take your mind off it.
We just don't deal with the real problem. We don't change to adapt to out situation. “It's easier to buy something new and feel good about yourself than it is to change yourself” . To tell the truth, if we truly wanted success we wouldn't constantly give up. We find sort of a tormented pleasure in out pain. Our loss gives us reason to complain and an excuse to quit. It happens so fast, our life becomes one big mistake excused for a single incident of failure. What a paradise we live in when we have the ultimate excuse to buy more material things.
We blame anything and everything when we fall. We blame others for our own mistakes. We even have the nerve to blame the God we don't believe in. We don't accept our inadequacies or try to improve as human beings, because we don't take responsibility in the first place. You are accountable. You decide who you are, not the circumstances of the world around you. Your life is what you make out of it. You cannot blame anyone else for what you could have accomplished. An adolescent mistake is to blame who you are on your parents, or how you were raised. People aren't realizing that by blaming something else, they're just giving an excuse for why they're not trying harder. Life isn't always fair, but if we just take the cards we've been dealt instead of complaining about them, so much more will be accomplished.
