Is it Human Nature to Always Want More?

Image by motoyen via Flickr

I regularly play the European lottery, after all like the saying says, you can only be sure not to win if you don’t play. This past week however I did something a little bit different and shared a ticket with my study group, and for the first time ever I actually won something! Granted it was a small prize, barely enough to cover the wager. But still it’s something. The reason why I’m telling you this is that while planning our bet we started talking about how much we would like to get, 1 million, 2 million, 30 million…. At the time the conversation seem harmless enough but when I was checking the numbers I started wondering: how much do we need to live? To be happy? And would we know when we have enough?

In a world of consumerism like ours It seems to me nobody knows any more how much money they need, or what is it that they need. Every day we are bombarded by images telling us to get this, do that. Images that push us to spend more consume more, do more. But do we really need all this? Or are things so out of control that we would fight to get another million just for the sake of having it? Has mankind become so greedy that there is no longer a limit? Or is it in human nature to always want more?

My sociology professor puts it in another way:

“We humans are experts at creating stereotypes” Idalina Sardinha

What she means is that today’s society has created a standard to what it means to have a good life, and this standard includes not only what we own but everything since friends to family. We must own a big house, have a husband and several children a fix job and more than 200 friends on facebook. We live so constricted by these guidelines that most of us will never find truth happiness not because we don’t have these things, but because we never bothered to look for what would make us happy and not society.

I truly believe that human nature is not like this, that although it’s in our hearts to always strive to go further and do something more and be better that does not directly translates to wanting always something else, another possession. I feel that all we truly need to do is to take charge of our life’s again, to take it upon ourselves to make the choices that rule us, leaving none of it to chance, or to society.

At the end of the day all of us need to take a step back, look at our life’s and realize what of the things we have in them we truly need. And we also need to set goals and limits to how much we need and what we need, cause if you search for happiness without ever stopping to wonder what it means, you will never find it, and you will never have enough things to fill the void in our hearts.

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