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Is There Something More? Does it Matter?
A perspective on how the constant desire for better value diminishes our overall quality of life.
Capitalism has a lot to answer for — severe income inequality, absurdly high medical costs, student loan debt requiring three lifetimes of labor and toil to repay — but it has to be said that a root cause of most of society’s ills is dissatisfaction; the disparity that results when the desire for something greater does not match the substance of your reality, when what you get is not measuring up to the depth of your desire.
According to the Buddhist Doctrine, or at least what I’ve come to understand comprises the same, a truism of the belief system is that desire is the cause of all suffering. I used to take this to mean that in order to eliminate suffering, one must eliminate desire. This seems easy enough to do from my perspective, because when you live with chronic depression, desire just has a way of slipping away on its own. As I’ve grown into middle-age, however, I’ve come to understand that desire can’t be eliminated fully, even in the depths of your most painful despair. If you get to a point where you hurt so much that you just can’t go on, the desire to forever end your suffering still exists.
