Thread: Greed and Vanity

If anyone remembers my other A through H little essays, here is an addition to it! tell me what you think!

C.

From birth, money and it's importance is pounded into our fragile and absorbing minds. We listen to our parents argue over money. We idolize our movie gods and thier millions of dollars and grow up wanting to be like them. We learn at an early age that money is success and success is happiness and therefore money is happiness. This idea, which I will call Wealth As A Basic Need, becomes so integral to our minds that we eventually adopt it as a fact and live out our lives with the sole purpose of accumilating money.

We live in a world where the square footage of your house is a deciding factor in your social status. We live in a time where having more cars than you really will ever need is a good thing. These days, we will pay thirty dollars for a t-shirt because it's brand shows people that we are well off and have money to burn.

Everyday, billions of people across the globe file into jobs and careers they hate simply so they can have some cash to get that new Ipod. People waste their time in their eight to five meaningless jobs, allowing themselves to deteriorate into mindless monkeys. People step on eachother and ruin lives bacuase of the oppurtunity to make some cash.

All this negativity in society and in our lives spawns from the fact that we are raised greedy.

But this Greed goes deeper than our upbringing and deeper that our parents and grandparents upbringing. As humans we never have enough. We always want to have more cattle or food or friends or useless gadgets than we had last year. To us, progress is an increase in capital. In this time, that need more for more has transered itself into a need for more money; Wealth As A Basic Need.

I beg of you, acknowledge that Wealth As A Basic Need is a false prophet. It is a detrimental and poisonous idea that must be wiped clean from our minds.

I recently spent some time in Fiji, traveling through the villages, giving aid to the people. Somewhere on Fiji, some corporation bought out some land and created a resort with beautiful water and warm sand where people can spend their money to relax in style and luxury. But if you travel inland, up into the hills and mountains, through the forest, you find whole villages made from scavenged sheet metal. While some people are on the beach sipping at thier expesive alchohols, the natives don't even have power or running water.

We bitch and moan when we miss our shows and some of these kids have never seen a tv. We complain about the twenty minute drive in traffic to work and these people walk miles to make miserable wages so they can barely feed their kids.

But the Fijians, they are always smiling. Because they have grown up in poverty, Wealth As A Basic Need does not exist to them. They make the best of their time here on earth, they have learned to be happy with life itself.

This is where the answer to Greed is.

Somehow, we need to put ourselves into a mindset of poverty and realize that in the end all the money we make, all the cars we have, all our sixty inch plasma tv's and our wasted space in our huge houses means absolutely shit. If we, as individuals and as a whole, can learn to live without our wealth, only then can we truly be happy.

D.

The definition of Vanity is "excessive pride in one's appearance". Ironically, another defintion of Vanity is "something worthless, trivial, or pointless".

Vanity has become a religion to us. We will spend hours in front of mirrors trying to decide what clothes and what style will make us look better. Our lives have become one giant fashion show. Beautiful people, models and movie stars have suddenly become role models and icons.

We love the pretty people and we shun the ugly people.

We will spend thousands of dollars on clothes and make up. We dedicate ourselves to someone elses idea of beauty.

To us, these days, beauty is what Abercrombie and Fitch and the Gap and the latest trend tell us it should be. We have become so convinced that we need to look like what corporate marketing tells us we should look like that we will spend one hundred and fifty dollars on two pairs of jeans.

Really, this is terrible. I hate seeing my friends and family fret so much about their appearance that they can't even enjoy themselves.

Vanity has made us all slaves to the style industry. We read our magazines that tell us what is cool to wear and we watch whole news programs dedicated to what hot now and everytime we allow someone else to tell us that beauty lies within their product, we lose a little bit of ourselves.

Vanity has instilled in us the inability to accept ourselves as who we are. Now we can't look at ourselves as beautiful unless we have the hard abs and the huge biceps or unless we can fit into a size 2.

None of that is beautiful.

You know what is beautiful? That boy you see running around so absolutely and totally carefree that nothing in the world is more important to him than whatever it is his imagination is showing him. You know what is beautiful? The person on the bus who gives up thier seat for an elderly woman, or that friend that is always, no matter what, willing to listen.

Thoughtfulness, humility, love, friendship, ambition; those are qaulities of beautiful people.

thanks for reading

the plethora of misspellings put me off immediately, so i didn't bother reading further... besides which, i always avoid stuff that tells me what it's going to tell me, instead of just going ahead and doing it... sorry, but you did ask...

love and hugs, maia

dont be sorry! I did ask so no worries. I took out that little intro, you were right, that was lame. and I went through and proof read it. so will you read it now?

it's a very nice piece, worlds... still has a raft of errors in spelling and grammar but, overall, your topics and conclusions are well presented... you should work on finding and fixing all the goofs, so your execution will be as good as your premise...

i'm clueless as to the meaning of the letters, though... why don't you use titles, instead?

There isn't any real reason for the letter. I just liked using as a way of putting my essays in order. But now, I do have a reason. go to www.myspace.com/theguerillaalphabet this is the myspace page I made trying to spread my essays. I usd myspace because its a great tool for reaching kids that need to be reached. But yeah, now the title of the page fits the letters.

I had a look on the myspace, and listened to it. Quite well read I found.

There is a great quote from James Allen about greed(the whole text is shown on my personal website):

...It is the custom in my household, during the hard frosts of winter, to put out food for the birds, and it is a noticeable fact that these creatures, when they are really starving, live together most amicably, huddling together to keep each other warm, and refraining from all strife; and if a small quantity of food be given them they will eat it with comparative freedom from contention; but let a quantity of food which is more than sufficient for all be thrown to them, and fighting over the coveted supply at once ensues...

...We see on the one hand millions of men and women chained to ceaseless slavery, interminably toiling in order to obtain a poor and scanty meal and a garment to cover their nakedness; and on the other hand we see thousands, who already have more than they require and can well manage, depriving themselves of all the blessings of a true life and of vast opportunities which their possessions place within their reach, in order to accumulate more of those material things for which they have no legitimate use. Surely men and women have no more wisdom than the beasts which fight over the possession of that which is more than they can all well dispose of, and which they could all enjoy in peace!