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Everything You Can’t Have

collabfund.com

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Re: Everything You Can’t Have

#81

Post by prmph »

kstenerud wrote: post #73

> A few years after leaving office, Richard Nixon mentioned that the richest people in the world are some of the unhappiest, because they can afford to never struggle. Except for those who choose a cause. Bill Gates comes to mind. > You feel that, gee, isn’t it just great to have enough money to afford to live in a very nice house, to be able to play golf, to have nice parties, to wear good clothes, to travel if you…

Good comment that matches my experience. I find that if the things I own are well made, and fill reals need or reasonable wants in my life, then I continue to enjoy them to a large extent, even if their novelty wears of. And this is true whether they were gifted to me or I struggled for them.

> Your brain doesn’t want stuff. It doesn’t even want new stuff. It wants to engage in the process and anticipation of getting new stuff.

On the contrary, I find myself avoiding hedonistic consumption more and more as the years go by. I scrutinize planned purchases for months, even if I can easily afford them, and I do wish the the world was less of a place where the solution to every problem seems to be to purchase something.

Re: Everything You Can’t Have

#83

Post by riskpreneurship »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #70
alexfromapex wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think this is just another lie told by Capitalism to keep people satiated. Anyone who doesn't feel fulfillment with unlimited supplies of money just doesn't know themselves very well.

Where exactly is this lie told and exactly who told it?

My grandparents and parents used to spout idioms like, "hard work is its own reward" as if they were inalienable truths.

IMO it's baked in at a cultural level, at this point. Where did it come from? You could point to the harsh Puritan work ethic, or the myth of meritocracy, or the rivers of blood lurking in the US' past, but there's probably no single root cause.

Re: Everything You Can’t Have

#84

Post by [deleted] »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #43

This article reads like something from a conversation you might have with an overconfident plumber who had just read an article in "Popular Science". Or someone who lives by IFL Science. Or TED Talks. Maybe the author should read some old philosophy. Another way to interpret what's going on is that people often look for happiness in all the wrong places, or confuse pleasure with happiness. In this case, the author is…

[deleted]

Re: Everything You Can’t Have

#85

Post by mmmuhd »

The author clearly has no experience of poverty, when you are poor, really poor, you have nothing to eat, you must go out to try to find something to eat, and finding the thing to eat is not assured, you'll know that owning things is the last thing on your mind, no matter what you come to be in life later, you'll live in constant fear of going back to poverty.

Re: Everything You Can’t Have

#86

Post by jemmyw »

I thought about this exact thing after the only time in my life so far I was in a position to get a brand new car. The research up to it was a lot more fun than actually having it.

I've run with this since, perhaps a little more than is healthy. Want something new: research aggressively but actually back out of ever buying. Our car (not the new one, that was a different country years ago) is getting to the point of needing more work than it's value, so I've been looking at new ones, taking test drives etc. But we won't buy any of those, we'll buy something used and quite old.

It might sound ok, I've got it solved and get that dopamine hit without consequence, but it's a huge waste of my time and it affects pretty much every purchase decision.

Re: Everything You Can’t Have

#88

Post by kristianp »

jemmyw wrote: post #86

I thought about this exact thing after the only time in my life so far I was in a position to get a brand new car. The research up to it was a lot more fun than actually having it. I've run with this since, perhaps a little more than is healthy. Want something new: research aggressively but actually back out of ever buying. Our car (not the new one, that was a different country years ago) is getting to the point of n…

I've recently enjoyed researching a new laptop purchase, even went so far as some web scraping. Getting the actual machine should be enjoyable too, but a let down because it means the end of reading about new hardware with such delicious intent.

Re: Everything You Can’t Have

#89

Post by cscurmudgeon »

riskpreneurship wrote: post #83
cscurmudgeon wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where exactly is this lie told and exactly who told it?

My grandparents and parents used to spout idioms like, "hard work is its own reward" as if they were inalienable truths. IMO it's baked in at a cultural level, at this point. Where did it come from? You could point to the harsh Puritan work ethic, or the myth of meritocracy, or the rivers of blood lurking in the US' past, but there's probably no single root cause.

> My grandparents and parents used to spout idioms like, "hard work is its own reward" as if they were inalienable truths.

Are you grandparents representatives of capitalism?

I am sure if you go to the most socialist or communist country out there, you will find grandparents saying the same thing. Source: me, I come from one such country.

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