English Essay
My third best work is about one of my best essays that was written about the book Great Gatsby, this was the final Essay worth around 100 points which was around 20% of the semester grade. I think because I really liked the book and enjoyed it, it wasn't much of a big deal for me to write this essay and recieve a good score on it. For the topic, we had to choose what to talk about.
Amarbayar 1
Enkhtsolmon Amarbayar
Molly Fenn
English ¾
December 7, 2014
Materializm equals happiness? Or the opposite
Ever since mankind discovered fancy items or jewels or anything that deemed more valuable than something else, they have started to become materialistic. That doesn’t mean that everyone wants to have the “best” things in the world, it just means that most people prefer the more flashier or nicer things than the older or the cheap looking ones. This raises the question, Why do people want to be materialistic rather than the opposite? One of the ways to answer this is because not being materialistic is “normal”, a lot of people don’t have that money to be materialistic so when someone actually has the money to do so then they become different. People want to be materialistic because it allows for them to have a “good” living, but by doing so, they get too obsessed with this “game” that they end up selling their soul, or they try to buy happiness.
People get too obsessed with this “game”, the “game” is life itself, you get one life, one opportunity to do whatever you want to do within the rules. Either you enjoy the game and do what you want to do regardless of the what society expects from you, regardless of what your parents expects from you, regardless of what everyone else expects of you, or you follow what everyone else is trying to do and try to be the best player in the game regardless of whether you want to be or not. This is greed, “The greedy make a life of getting, taking, scheming and
Amarbayar 2
thinking about how to keep what they have and how to get more - they don’t enjoy it because they worry too much about it, it’s an everyday all day obsession...which causes debts, bankruptcy, divorce, theft, jail, suicide and so on” (Brad Klontz, Psy.D.). Greed more money is an obsession of obtaining money 24/7, and it is almost like a drug, you need it all the time and you are scared to lose it. As I stated not all people are greedy/materialistic but those you are greedy have a problem and they don’t enjoy their life because they are always worrying about this one thing, getting money.
You never see someone who followed their passion get burned (metaphorically) because they did so, they might not be the most “successful” people you know but they are happy and they are truly living their life. On the other hand, you always see materialistic people’s lives are not going the way they want it to, they either need this or that, they always have some problems, and in the end when they are old, they usually say, “I wish I followed what I wanted to do”. By trying to live a rich/materialistic life most people end up selling their souls or if you are lucky you might end up getting best of the both worlds; do what you love to do and get paid extremely high for doing so. Selling your soul is a beautiful metaphor, it basically means that for wanting happiness you exchanged your passion for that. You might look “happy” from the outside with all the jewels and nice clothing but in the inside you are rotting because everyday is a drag, you are always doing the things you don't want to do and every time you do it, the part of you dies with it. In his blog Dr. Ryan Howell writes, “The more-materialistic participants got less happiness from experiential purchases, because such purchases didn’t fit with their personality and values”. Human happiness are brought out by many ways, in the beginning being
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materialistic is nice, you have a great life where you can afford the things you “need” but then as you keep wanting more and more stuff you have to work harder and when you do get the things you want, you are not satisfied because all that hard work that you didn’t want to do does not equal the happiness that thing brought you.