If there is excess, a material life is easy to live. And in America for almost a century we’ve been living in excess. At the end of the second world war this country emerged as almost the only fully industrialized nation in the world. That head start along with a culture that Winston Churchill admiringly described as utilitarian has pushed this country along an astounding path to riches. However, the rest of the world is catching up, at least materially. The big difference now is that culture, and it needs to be revisited.
That material excess also created a difference in the culture while the core of American values are still present it’s been diluted at it’s periphery by materialism. Americans still want to work hard and succeed, but that success is too often now identifed with a material status. It was described to me the other day how people in our society do not remove the tags on their clothing. There are apparently two reasons for this, the first is to return items after they are worn. The second is to establish that those articles are in fact expensive. Right now, I’m interested in the latter. But wearing tags on your cloathing so that others can more easily recognize it’s ascribed value is only a very extreme circumstance. If you make decisions on what to buy based on others acknowledgement of your purchase, you’re doing life wrong.
I’m going to boil this down to a very simple explanation: it is impossible to be successful if your definition of success is based on the acquisition of material things. That is because you yourself require things, you expend things, in order to survive. That means that intrinsically your survival is always a negative factor towards what you can acquire. There will always be less because of what you use. (1Cor15:36)
Alternatively if you set your success on the development of values then you’ll add to the total of that value. You will never decrease the sum of the values that you set yourself to live by, they will always increase, and be increased due to your presence in this world. Find your value set, focus on developing it and instead of simply consuming: witness a true contribution to the world.