First thought of the day..

Having gone to an elitist private school, and an uber-elitist private university, I was around a lot of rich kids whose lives I have envied and gave myself hell for: "Life is not fair!", "Why can't I go to Canary Islands for spring break?", "If I had money, then I would be beautiful, because I'd be able to afford expensive clothes, beauty products, liposuction!! (sad but true, I'm blushing) and all that jazz".

Aside from the fact the fact that I am already rich compared to 90% of the world's population, money definitely does not signify wealth. Having some money in my wallet and some more in the bank already puts me in the top 10 percentage of the world's richest people. There are many people on earth who don't know where their next meal is going to come from. That being said, having money does not guarantee a rich life. Those who are rich can have very poor lives too.
Let's take this rich friend of mine as an example. Her father already had millions of dollars in the bank, and it was enough money for her and her kids so that she didn't care about school or learning or grades that much. What she did was, study and go to classes maybe 10% of her time, and spend the rest of her day shopping, hanging out in her room surfing the net, buying DVDs and watching them in her room, downloading sitcoms online and watching them in her room, watching television, shopping some more, watching some more sitcoms from her DVDs, going to expensive restaurants, reading fashion magazines, buying, buying and buying. You get the idea. Just to give her some credit, she was very social and had lots of "friends" and she also hung out with them frequently. But the thing is that most of her friends were the kind of people who respected her a little bit more when she bought a new Gucci purse. The other thing is that she more frequently chose to watch "Friends" on TV than to hang out with her real friends.

When I went to a meditation club meeting just two days ago and J., a yogi and a spiritual mentor, told us that your mind is constantly seeking love, peace, security and happiness, but does not know the difference between actions that truly give us the desired outcome and those that just create a temporary illusion of it. Your mind just runs after the things that will give you a momentary feeling of love, security etc. without noticing what's lasting and what's not. It is something other than your mind which knows the difference. That's why enough is never enough for most people. That's why your new i-pod or laptop does not give you the fulfillment that you thought it would.

You're sitting in your room and need some love, some company, maybe some adventure, some action, but instead of trying to make these things happen, instead of trying to make some friends for instance, you turn on the TV and watch "Friends". That fills the void inside you temporarily. It gives you an artificial feeling of what it's like to be amongst friends. And what do you get in return? Nothing! You get no love, no affection, no fulfillment by watching that sitcom. Instead, you fill your mind with assumptions as to what kind of a life you should have, what you're supposed to look like etc. You get what you put into things. What do you put into watching TV? Nothing. What do you put into reading fashion magazines? Absolutely nothing. What do you put into surfing aimlessly on the net?, What do you put into buying 20 pairs of shoes?, What do you put into compulsive flirting? Nothing at all.

Imagine that you suddenly stopped all the activities that don't require any input. How hard it would be to come up with new ways of finding ways to fill that time!! 4 hours spent not in front of the TV or internet, but with something else. We all do it. We all have "soft addictions". You would (or maybe not) really have to push the boundries of your creativity to come up with something really meaningful to do with your time. You would risk getting hurt or criticized but it would be worth it.

Now I realize that her life, which I've envied so much, was empty.
It was shallow.
It never gave her the things she really needed.
It was a poor life.

Now, I like my life better. Maybe I didn't go to Canary Islands or Barbados for spring break but I went to Cuba and it was quite enriching.

(PS: I'm going to make a difference in my life and not watch that sitcom that I used to watch every monday evening. I challenge you to change one thing in your life that you know is superficial but keep doing it because you are sort of addicted to it.)