The Bonds of Materialism

I was thinking on this stuff this weekend when I made up a little thought experiment.  You want to play?  Read on!

Consider if all of a sudden you were plucked from life as you know it and were dropped in the middle of Mongolia to herd sheep.  Or pigs if you prefer.  You would live in a small yurt and your day would consist only of your herding duties with your sheep.  Or pigs.  What would you feel?

How would you feel not having your bed to sleep in at night?  Or your normal food?  Or any of the modern conveniences such as a phone, internet, modern plumbing, or fifty-three changes of clothes with matching shoes?  How would you feel not having the modern materialistic world around us?

Think about money.  How would you feel not having a cent to buy whatever you want or need?  What about making do with just what you have?  Entertainment as you know it would be gone – no movies, out-to-eat, or concerts.  Even the concept of paper to write on would be too far-fetched.  How would you feel?  Think about being desolately poor.

What about friends and family?  Could you leave them behind?  Would you miss them?

What about work?  That promotion that you were working for is not happening.  That book you are writing?  No one will read it.  The music in your head will be silent – can you leave these goals behind?

I might be off the mark, but I think that most of us would be anxious considering this prospect.  How could we cope?  We’ve gotten used to it and we’ve assumed that it will always be here.

Consider this – we are just as human as every other human in the world.  There are some people who live exactly like I described above.  No modern convenience - life is consumed with survival and making do with the meager materials that they have.  There is little thought to amusement, entertainment, what feels good, what tastes good and the like.  But unlike us, who are bound to modernity, they are free.

So what am I getting at?  Well the first thing is, I need to do a blog post or else I’ll forget how to do one.  It’s been over a week since I finished one.  OK – besides that, my point is that we have imprisoned ourselves with our hubris and our modern lifestyle.  Our modern lifestyle is consumed with materialism, consumerism, and the pursuit of wealth.  We need the latest gadgets and toys, we need to have expensive cars and houses, and we need to grab as much cash as we can.  The harder we hold onto these things, the tighter our bonds become.  We are no longer free to help others.  We are no longer free to contemplate God.  We are no longer able to become the people that God wants us to be.

As for our hubris, consider how much of our lives are tied to vulnerable infrastructure.  Consider how crippled our society is when the power is out during a one-in-five year storm.  Consider how much energy is spent on acquiring money that can in an instant become as useful as toilet paper.  Do we know what would happen to our digital world during a hyper intensive solar storm? Consider that we have only had our level of technology for a couple of decades.  The sun has been around for four and a half billion years.  Do you think that we know every kind of radiation that the sun can throw at us like a one-in-a-million year event occurs?  It is within the realm of possibility that the modern world as we know it can collapse almost instantly, and we all will be forced to herd sheep.  Or pigs.

Now consider standing on the precipice of life, just about ready to die.  That is about the same as the thought experiment – we lose everything that we have lived for.  All those goals that we had will be left unfinished.  All of our wealth will be gone.  Whatever reputation that we had will be washed away in the ocean of time and we will be forgotten.  When all of that is taken away, is there anything left of us?  Can we let go at that point and take the plunge?

The point of this exercise was to identify how materialism is binding to our souls.  We can be called at a moment’s notice to drop everything and do something drastic; do something wonderful – but we can’t if follow through if we are bound.

I could probably write about several aspects of this thought experiment, but I think that I am going to stop here.  I have some thoughts about my situation that actually helped me to move forward in this journey.  I will hopefully share that with you all next Friday.

God bless,

Sven