INFLATED DISSATISFACTION

 Our consumer culture highlights what we don’t have. Ingenious commercial promotion, advertising and aggressive social media marketing, are designed to inflate our desires deluding us that we need more of the things we don’t have and sending us subliminal messages that what we have aren’t enough or good enough; that we are missing out on the good life.. It inflates dissatisfaction and envy, greed and covetousness. This worldly appeal to human desire  is spoken of in the Bible as the lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. (1 John 2:16)

God wants us to be content with what we have. (Philippians 4:11) One who is content has plenty of peace of mind, far greater than any material gain. One who inordinately feeds his wants soon gets tired of things, feels empty and stays unsatisfied. The French Philosopher Albert Camus once observed: “Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity.” The hedonistic outlook is not supported by Scripture. In the book of Ecclesiastes, the writer delves deep into the folly of chasing pleasure: “I said to myself, ‘Come now, I will test you with pleasure to find out what is good.’ . . . I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure” (Ecclesiastes 2:1, 10). But in the end the verdict was that “everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun” 

The great Apostle Paul in his instruction to the young Apostle Timothy said,  “But godliness with contentment is great gain. 7 For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. 8 But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. 9 Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.” ( 1 Timothy 6:6-9). 

In verse 9, the good Apostle is not speaking of the generally wealthy man but of one who is not even wealthy but is consumed by the unmitigated lust for wealth or an already wealthy man but similarly consumed and possessed by the desire to amass more  regardless of the means. The consequence is tragic.