Mind over Emotion
posted by Sarah Chia
My mother-in-law, who’s a florist, is in town this week. Last night, she succinctly explained how items sell in her shop by saying, “It’s exciting to have new things. And people will buy it whether they need it or not.”
Isn’t that the truth? It’s exciting to have new things, and we buy new things to get excitement into our lives. We are looking for an emotional sensation, so we spend time, energy, and money buying material items to crowd our houses.
But what if, instead of letting our emotions control our decisions, we allow our reason to influence our emotions. I say “influence” because emotions are, in part, a spontaneous reaction to something. I think I might miss some of that if I were to start trying to control my emotions completely. I certainly do think it’s worth reasoning out our emotions, though, to see if they are really worth acting on. And perhaps, as we do, we can start to influence them to come around at other, more appropriate times.
Because if we think through it, it isn’t really true that new things are exciting. Not inherently, anyway. They’re only exciting when we put value on newness. Perhaps it’s social conditioning to think that something new is exciting. What if we start to value something else? Whatever we value will be exciting.
If we value reusable, then reusable items will be exciting. If we value up-cycling, then up-cycled items will be exciting. If we value our family members and friends over items of any kind, then time spent in building relationships will be exciting.
So, moving away from excessive consumerism and toward simplicity is somewhat a matter of mind of emotion. We need to take time to decide what is valuable to us before acting on emotional impulses. But the great is that when we reason through what is valuable, we also find that emotional satisfaction emerge from other places.
Comments
[...] Mind over Emotion | A Guy Named Dave. [...]
I am doing this since 2011, when I gave away all the things that could not fit on the motorbike. I decided to keep only the things that had multiple purpose, or might be used in more than one way.
I still use the camping pots to make a coffee even at home, now that I am back from my adventure. Never saw any use for a new one, because having a small number of objects makes me feel really free.
And what’s the point of buying new stuff when they all have such a limited life span, like they are made to brake in 2 or 3 years (if you’re lucky).
The issue with buying new stuff has some different psychological reasons behind. I know I was buying a lot of stuff before because I did not had any free time available to spend my money on things that I really wanted to do (like travel the world), and I was working really long hours to have those money. After 10 or 12 hours a day at the office, when I had my paycheck in front of me I was kind of revenging on “the office” buying stuff that I did not really needed, but I wanted to own them as an award to explain why I was working so hard.
Other than that, I think most of us are buying new stuff to show off or be part of this society who is used to buy a lot of stuff because we are “forced” by media to believe that changing your car every couple of years is the normal way to do. I can’t stop wandering when I see all the commercials right before christmas that are telling me that my house needs a gift and I should buy new furniture. Or, more than that, look over the Apple culture, new gadgets, and expensive ones also, are coming out about 6 months. And people do not buy them because they’re better. They buy them because the’re new, and you’re not hip if you only have the first generation out of *kin 20 that came out in 3 years.
We are not actually buying the objects themselves (I say “we” because I was like this also up till 2 years ago), we buy them for the so called “social status” that they bring us. “Oh, you bought a new car!” and from the look of the friend telling us this we think that he is sort of jealous of our wonderful living standard, we’re doing well. But do we stop for a second to realize that the car is not actually ours? It is financed by a bank that owns it till we will manage to pay for it. That’s if we do not buy another one and lose some more money to the bank.
And if we are talking about small objects, like clothes, you only have to look to your wife or girlfriend when she is buying something, and you can understand another issue. But I do not want to go there and have all the women’s up my head…
)
I think that thinking before we act, not following an emotion, if you manage to master it , this can be applied on any aspect of your life. And then you can actually realize that you’re in control, and not the ones who are paid to make a campaign so they can sell some company product to you, based on some psychological glitches that they know you have. And you know how they know that? Because they created them. I used to work in advertising since ’98. We had tons of books in our office teaching us how to make people fall in love with our stupid things that we were trying to sell.
So, one has to understand that he is buying stuff not because he want that stuff, but because someone else wants you to buy it. And also, you’re not buying it for you, but for your friends to see you owning something new. I do not want to include here those who are buying new stuff because the old one that they were using had broken. I consider that “replacing” something, and keeps you in a good spot.