Link: Breaking Free From Consumerist Chains

We are not consumers. We are people.
We are not living lives meant to earn money in order to support a shopping habit, or a large home and two cars, or lives of luxury eating and entertainment.
We are not living to support the corporations. And yet, if you were to take an objective, outsider look at our society, it would seem that we are.
We spend our childhoods — precious years that are far too fleeting — in schools geared to give us the best chance at getting a job. We then graduate and are highly pressured to go to college (getting into large debt in the process) so we can have the best chance at getting a good paying job. Then we claw at each other for the coveted but limited good paying jobs, and the winners are rewarded with big homes and SUVs and nice clothes (and lots of debt to go with all that). The losers are stuck in menial jobs they hate, envious of others they see on TV with luxury lives, eating cheap fast food and consigned to shopping at bargain outlets.
Either way, we find our path as consumers. And everything is solved by consumption — when we’re stressed, we shop. When we want to be entertained, we buy the entertainment. We buy our food in packages, we fix our failing health by buying exercise clothes and equipment. We fix our debt by buying personal finance books and taking out a second mortgage.
Our lives are beholden to our shopping habits. We are slaves to corporations, doing work we loathe for stuff we don’t need.
What if we could break out of it?

Read the full post here... http://zenhabits.net/free

Clinging Causes the Pain

Genuine love and kindness is desperately needed in this world. It comes from appreciating the object, and rejoicing in the object, wanting the object to be happy and well, but holding it lightly, not tightly. And this goes for possessions too. You are in an extremely materialistic society in which the possession of more and bigger and better is held up as the total criteria for being happy.

Read the full post here... http://www.ijourney.org/?tid=658

Where are you going? And, why? (Pretending like crazy that what you’re doing really matters)

I recently had my mind blown by an incredibly profound experience of what Buddhists call emptiness, or “dropped-off body-mind.” In such an experience “how it all is and what it’s all about” becomes stunningly obvious. All ideas dissolve–ALL ideas. Ideas, premises, beliefs, theories, maps of reality, are seen as inconsequential, insubstantial, uninteresting, beside the point. Instead, there’s just an infinitely deep peace, a vast expansiveness, a deep and profound knowingness about the essence of it all–and, the realization that all of this is who you are.

Read the full post here...
http://www.centerpointe.com/blog/2009/07/13/where-are-you-going-and-why-pretending-like-crazy-that-what-youre-doing-really-matters/#more-51