Straight from the Narwhal's Mouth - March

The Forbidden Narwhal

--- Steven Albers

     

      Why is it that we so often want the things we don’t/can’t have? For whatever reason, it never seems like all the perfectly fine stuff we have is still, well, lacking. I know I’m always waiting for the next great movie or video game to stroll by, only so I can quickly get my fill then move on to the next piece of entertainment on the list. This doesn’t just apply to fun/entertainment, though. Every aspect of your life is touched, with varying intensity, by this immense lust for those fantastic things you know you’ll never have. Further still, though, the short term goals you constantly make to keep yourself well equipped can easily start to rule your life if left unchecked.

     Your car may not be as glamorous as that Murciélago you’ve been ogling over, but it runs perfectly fine and does exactly what it’s supposed to. Maybe your computer doesn’t run a quad-core with a solid-state 10 TB hard drive & 64GB of RAM, but unless you plan on launching 317 rockets to Neptune simultaneously, the computer you have will do just fine.

     This all sounds like a harmless pool of pipe dreams, but if you start to let yourself get absorbed by conquest after conquest of nice things to have, you’ll start to lose touch over stuff that’s actually important.

     You know about games like FarmVille and City Story, right? They symbolize the epitome of the whole “want what you can’t have” mentality, and as a result, people start spending money and time on them, rather than on something like a job or school. You’ll sit around waiting for your ghost chilis to finish growing time and time again, all so that in a week you can do the exact same thing. With sugar cane. It’s a vicious cycle, even addictive according to some. But it’s a fantastic time-sink that we hardly know is vastly hurting our overall effectiveness in life.

      None of this is saying that you should drop all material possessions & become a vagrant (or stop playing FarmVille for that matter), by any means. I just hope that you can keep the bigger picture in the back of your mind while you strive after these little pointless goals. It’s always good to reward yourself with little victories every once in a while, but if you let those little victories turn into extensive projects, other areas of your life will start to slide in the most unexpected of ways.