Hi Everybod
Well I'm back from Mexico and all that sea and sunshine and windsurfing and tennis and food and Mayan ruins and well...lots of good things. I really rate mid-winter holidays, and when you get back the daffodils are out in the garden and it's spring already!! Sarah always takes a couple of my books with her and puts them on the left-books shelves to see what happens...and they both went on the first day, and stayed went! It's her little bit of kosen rufu on holiday. This time it was this book so 2 somebodies are reading The case for Buddhism when they didn't expect to.
OK so where were we in February? Half way through Chapter Eleven I think, and we're in the middle of the section about western-way-of-life societies being much richer places than they were 50 or so years ago, but no happier. Strangely enough I noticed while I was away that BBC Worldwide is actually running a series of mini documentaries on just this subject, and one I watched talked of western wealth doubling in that time...but there being no real change in how people felt about their lives....which brings us precisely to where we were in Chapter Eleven!
' Why do we find that so surprising? Because of course in today's western societies the vast mass of the population has more of almost everything you care to name; the list is endless, more comfort, more food, more houses, more cars, more health, more leisure, more partners...but not it seems more happiness, or more well-being, or more general satisfaction with life.
So what kinds of answers have the sociologists come up with to help us understand this restless modern malaise, because it's only with a better understanding of course that we can begin to do something about it, in order to move on from it. As you would expect there are no single or simple answers, but there are some truly brilliant insights that help to open our eyes to what is really going on. We can all too easily it seems find ourselves trapped in a sort of materialist dead end.
Professor Layard for example, eminent economist from the LSE, talks of a ' hedonic treadmill.' That's that Greek word again meaning pleasure, and the treadmill you might say comes from the hamster's cage, to indicate that we can spend a lot of time, going around in circles, chasing our tails. It's the phenomenon we mentioned a moment ago he more we have...the more it seems we go on wanting. In an age of immense plenty there is still so much we find to hunger after, that it can undermine or diminish or even cancel out altogether, the pleasure and the joy we might feel in all that we undoubtedly have.We'll come back to that word hunger again in a minute because it offers a fascinating link between the modern social research and what Buddhism has to tell us about this key issue.
The psychologists tell us that comparison with others is part of the way we function as human beings, buried deeply in our psyche. We all do it, even if we're not always aware that we are doing it. So it's a constant and immensely influential dimension in our lives, and it has a very real effect on our overall sense of self-worth, an on our general sense of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with our lives. As the American psychologist Sonja Lyubomirski has expressed it;
' The more social comparisons you make, the more likely you are to encounter unfavourable comparisons, and the more sensitive you are to social comparisons the more likely you are to suffer their negative consequences...You can't be envious and happy at the same time.'
What a warning that is...' you can't be envious and happy at the same time!'
That in essense is the paradox revealed. It seems that instead of our enjoying a really solid sense of satisfaction because of our own considerably improved circumstances, almost the reverse can happen. The vastly greater knowledge of other people's wealth and possessions, which is so visible in today's western-style societies, seems to have become the source of a much wider and more broadly felt sense of dissatisfaction, the reference anxiety we mentioned earlier, which chews away at our appreciation of all the good things that we undoubtedly do have in our lives.
But the remarkable thing for me I have to say is just how closely this very modern and scientific analysis, which lays bare for us the powerfully disturbing and unsettling effects of the constant itch to acquire more stuff, chimes with the classic Buddhist description of the life state of Hunger. Which underlines for us once again just how accurate and therefore how valuable to us, is the Budhist analysis of the dynamics of human motivation and behaviour. Budddhism describes this life state as the root cause of a great deal of self-inflicted pain and suffering, with the emphasis very clearly on the fact that it is self inflicted. We choose to go there.
And that's where we go next episode.
Thanks for reading this far. It's much appreciated.
See you next time I hope.
Best wishes,
William
The Case for Buddhism is available on Amazon or as a download from Kindle.
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