venstresida.net

Whenever I visit Norway I am always perplexed by how everybody I know always seems to have the latest of nearly everything concerning technology and what not.. What happened to this country that have made us change our phones every six months and swop our cars with a better version every two-five years?... trends...even being concerned with the environment is now trendy and having the means to eat organic and free range only a symbol of status...its sad

I don't think these bloggers should be held responsible for anything else than being oblivious about their own emptiness, being trapped in the illusion of not having our needs met which is quite upsetting....in which seems to be feeding this great need to buying a sense of happiness.... Sadly.. the younger we are the less developed our brains are and the easier they can be manipulated into little needs machines...and hence, become the driving force behind this neverending consumerist cycle. However... we all do it to some extent..I get trapped all the time often running around mindlessly and coming home with heaps of stuff i regret profusely the next day...I have to remind myself to stop up!

A while back I had a conversation with a friend of me in the advertising industry about this "upgrade mentality" and how I often felt like I had to buy new things whilst visiting Norway..how I always watched a lot more TV than I do where I now live, and how I felt that somehow... no matter how nice I looked and how many things I had accumulated it was never quite enough... of course, this is to do with my own issues of not feeling good enough in which there may be 1000 reasons for also but we pondered the possibility of people watching a lot more TV due to more hours spent inside as driving some of this need to buy something.. thanks to the endless passive exposure to TV, reality shows, entertainment of all sorts, ads etc with frequent focus on what we should be like, what we should have, how our lives should be like ....thanks to globalization it is now also possible to buy new stuff as a faster rate and have more access to new technology than only a few years ago...

However, no matter how we twist and turn and look for someone to blame the reality is that the current world is essentially a manifestation of our own chronic emptiness and need to fill it with something.. some quick fix that may keep us satisfied untill we need our next fix.. shopping is addictive and rewarding and activated the same pathways in the brain as cocaine...people behind marketing principles knows this! The more we feed it the more we need it.. and of course it feels good when we gets our needs met.. but hang on... why doesn't it last forever??!!!

Technological advances means that we live in a fast paced world or high turnover where we rarely make time to slow down and just enjoy the present and be completely aware of what's going on...it allowed us to multitask and make life easier... for what purpose? Only to remove ourselves further from ourselves and prevent us from living here and now...when did you last stop and look at one of the street musicians on Karl Johan? when did you last consciously eat a meal and taste every forkful of it and really enjoy the flavors? when did you last just sit with yourself without doing absolutely nothing and feel truly content and at ease??? the ability to just be.. here and now.... it's a skill about to be forgotten..

Sadly, in some generations this ability might no longer exist as we wont' have the patience to do it, as our minds are too restless and used to being fed info at a rapid pace...we're on auto pilot...for example.. everybody's favorite Skomakergata is no longer considered suitable for children in the weeks leading up to Christmas as they get bored and needs something more stimulating...something that feeds their brains new info at least every 4 seconds...

In my opinion the key to stopping up and changing our behaviors and hence the downfall of this society is through awareness.....and mindfullness...how do we really feel?.....and is it so unbearable we are unable to just sit with it as opposed to seeking an instant fix? do we really need that extra pair of jeans and another eye shadow?Is that gonna help? Might there be something else that might be more useful? I suppose the real challenge here is how to create a greater awareness of how our own brains works which is what gets us trapped in the first place... and yes, younger people with less developed brains becomes a great target in which had the potential to create this illussion of these unmet needs...