Acquisition of wealth no longer the driving force of life

"For many men, the acquisition of wealth does not end their troubles, it only changes them"

- Letters from a Stoic by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, often known simply as Seneca. He was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and in one work humorist of the Silver Age of Latin literature.

What is life, its origin, its driving force; and what does living denote? Not those many meanings of it all found in dictionaries, encyclopaedias, and dissertations that are mostly meaningless to the ordinary citizen of planet earth; but the inherent and real meaning contained in our existence and our search for a reason for such existence.

Amidst all that confusing, conflicting, contradicting, theories galore; some saying it to be an illusion and a dream; a creation of our mind; whereas some others say it is all about finding, and creating, our selves; what does it intrinsically imply to the common man, the ordinary everyday citizen of any country? Is it all about our eating, sleeping, excreting, replicating, communicating, acquisitioning: the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death; or is it the death ending search for happiness, in addition to all that activity afore stated? How do we account for all those events that take place within the space and time of an individual's existence?

The answers to this question has eluded and puzzled many a philosophers and great thinkers, since the earliest of times - ever since man began to think.

However, the miserable mortal, the modern man, lives as though acquisition is life: the acquisition of culture capital, wealth and possessions, more than the gain of knowledge having greater meaning.

In times to come, however, the acquisition of wealth will no longer be the driving force of our life; the obsession, as it seems with the majority of us today due to our inherent poverty of mind and matter.

While it may not entirely cease to exist, for it would be difficult to predict the exact nature of our economy at a time in that distant a future, it would have certainly grown less in importance.

Desire

The desire for knowledge - unlike the insatiable thirst for riches - would have increased with the increased possession of it; and the operations of our understanding, intuition, and deduction, alone will remain in its acquisition.

As hunger, want, greed, and the need and thirst for possessions finally eliminated; the virtues of our citizenry would be defined by concepts of harmony, goodwill, and principles of equality amongst humans. Truth and ethics would reign.

We will enter a new world order where intelligence, and the strength of wisdom, will rule; where, the class that has the power to rob upon a large scale and the capacity to legalise their robbery would have ceased to exist.

After all, there are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, like a laborious mosaic. Hence, men and women would work to become, not to acquire; and they would have acquired immunity to eloquence: the hallmark of democracy.

A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs.

Instead, we would develop the ability to acquire new and better forms of knowledge that we can apply to our work and to our lives, and those who develop this ability will be the movers and shakers in our society of the future. Recent research has established that about half our happiness is genetically determined. Up to another 38 percent comes from events that have happened in our recent past.

Hurdles

This though, the happiness that emanates out of events, will not last very long.

That leaves the balance under our control and it is this 12 percent or so that will eventually tilt the scale in the final determination of whether one is happy in life, or not.

This 12 percent may not sound as much, but by choosing to invest this in four basic values of faith, family, friendships, and work ensures the surest path to happiness; given that the majority is genetically and circumstance influenced, and not under our control.

Hence, even in present times, in spite of the innumerable hurdles in life, one could remain happy as long as one has the ability to invest this small amount of happiness quotient in cultivating the right values in life.

In all this though, one might wonder what role religion plays in our life.

I am not too sure what role it plays in our life in present times, but the main business of religions ought to be to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for riches, which men acquire as a result of their greed.

Money might make truly poor people happier as it relieves the pressure of their everyday life and helps them get enough to eat, a place to live, and health.

But once those basic necessities are achieved, it means nothing much. It is to that day that all of us look forward to, even if it is in the distant future.

But for now, we as a nation of people are truly poor; so poor that, the only thing we care for in life is money.

Anyone who attempts to live within their means would be termed to suffer from a lack of imagination because it is only those who live by plunder are capable of achieving it: the capacity to live within one's means.

Many politicians have ensured that it be that way; that while they have all the opportunity to satiate their greed and gluttony, the majority of people remain poor and broken.

Poverty is a noose that strangles humanity; tramples the poor, the weak, and the hapless. A hungry man is not a free man. His hunger does not permit him that luxury. Instead, honest and hungry men are, sold into slavery.

The fields of the poor may produce abundant food, but injustice sweeps it away. Hence, only a just nation can eliminate poverty.

Though acute hunger and poverty are no longer prevalent in Sri Lanka, poverty still remains widespread and continues to pose a challenge despite Sri Lanka being an exceptional country with its life expectancy, literacy rate, and other social indicators nearly on par with those of developed countries, and even topping the rankings for the South Asia region.

Standard

While all these indicate that Sri Lanka should be experiencing a high, standard of living, it has only ranked in the medium category of the Human Development Index.

This is despite the fact that Sri Lanka has been experiencing an acceptable rate of growth for the past several years.

That being so, if we as a nation are to enter that distant future where, acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of life, we ought to reflect more as to why we are currently ranked in the bottom one third of the world.

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