Lost Sheep

I read an interesting and thought provoking article that I would like to share with you. The main theme of the article was that we are on an endless treadmill searching for success through the amighty dollar. As we achieve some form of success we find that we are still searching for happiness although some people do think that money brings them happiness.

The average household has three TVs. We sit in front of these idiot boxes and we're bombarded with messages on how to be succesful. They parade all kinds of successful people selling us stuff that's suppose to make us feel happy. That stuff is supposed to fill the void in our soul. What do you do with all that stuff when your child or parent or loved one is struck by some catastrophic illness? What happens to all that stuff when all of sudden, like the people that worked at Enron, you lose your job pension and health insurance?

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, there are now enough self-storage units in the United States to cover the entire area of Manhattan three times over, or fill all 110 stories of the Sears Tower in Chicago 426 times. That’s where our stuff lives. Happily ever after. And remember, that doesn’t include what’s in our playrooms, attics, basements, and garages.

Consumeritis is highly contagious. In China several megamalls have out-spaced Canada’s West Edmonton Mall, which until recently was the largest worldwide. The International Herald Tribune reports that on a good day 600,000 shoppers pass through Guangzhou’s colossal mall in southern China. The Golden Resources Mall in Beijing (a five-story building twice the area of Minnesota’s Mall of America) employs 20,000 people, spans an area the size of six football fields, and is more than one and a half times as big as the Pentagon.

Why is it that with all the stuff we have we see millions of people wandering around like lost sheep looking for a deeper meaning to their life?

Viktor Frankl writes in Man Searching For Meaning:

Again and again I admonish my students both in Europe and in America: “Don’t aim for success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself."

In order to achieve happiness and success we need to make some hard choices ourselves. Stuff or service. Purchases or purpose. Unfortunately this is not the so called American way as can be evidenced by our own President telling us after the tragedy of 9/11 to go shopping, don't be afraid. Thank God for the people that didn't listen to him and dropped everything to go to New York to help their fellow men. These were the ones that chose service over stuff and purpose over purchase.

The Army's slogan tells us, "Be all that you can be!"