Simplicity and greed

2 guys sit at a bar:
- Odd thing how people simply fail how to see this...
- What's that?
- You see, old chum, this is a basic thing in life. Most of our lives is flutter, junk, triviality. And yet we surround ourselves with it, we keep accumulating aimlessly, in pursuit of love, happiness, satisfaction, success, thrills... always looking for more, although that just ends up pulling us further away from living well. 'The human being is insatiable', hah!
- Man you're off again. I don't get you...
- What I'm trying to say is that most people don't know what's important to them. If people only knew what was really important to them, that would be that.
- ... umh, right...
- Okay, let's take an example. Take your daughter. Give her a doll or a teddy to play with. She'll cherish it, take care of it, talk to it, keep it next to her 'forever and ever'. The doll or teddy, doesn't matter what it is, becomes a real companion, something of real value... emotional value that is... Remember when we were kids with our little bags of marbles. None of us had more than 15 marbles... 15 measly, crummy and thoroughly worn and scratched marbles. Yet those marbles were our lives! God, how nice that was.
- I know... I remember..
- Anyway... back to your daughter, suppose we were to give her 100 dolls or teddies. What do you think would happen instead?
- She'd give them 100 names and play with them all equally.
- I don't think so. More likely she'd feel lost. I believe that 100 dolls would give her less happiness than a single one. There'd simply be too many of them to contend with, and too much for one little mind.. no... one little HEART to care for. That's where the term "spoiled" comes from: the complete loss of perspective.
- What are you getting at?
- See, with the one doll, it doesn't matter if the doll is ugly or the teddy's fur has gone dry and rash from one too many washings. The kid will love that doll or teddy like it's the only thing in the universe worth loving. And actually, in the kid's universe, that statement would actually be literally true! The real value of doll, or the teddy, or the bag of marbles lies in the fact that there's something very personal about them. What I'm trying to say is that the more things we own, the more things we accumulate, the more indifferent we become to them. The girl with 100 dolls will keep wanting the latest, most beautiful doll. The girl with 1 doll will never want to replace her doll, no matter how worn old it is. In fact, she'll fight with tooth and nail to keep it!
- Aaaah. I see where you're getting. I never thought about it that way. Get rid of the non-essential things in our life, stop accumulating useless stuff because that just takes our attention things away from what we already do have, and focus on the things that we know we truly love... In other words, Simplicity!
- hmm.. versus greed... But you know, one thing still puzzles me. This same reasoning functions the other way too. Our minds can only handle so much. We can only devote so much energy, care on the good things in life, and the more there is to care for, the less we care. On the OTHER hand... the same is true for the negative things in life. If life all goes well, we panic over the smallest sign of trouble, feel miserable, complain, and, well, it becomes one big drama. But the more hardship we face, the more ugly things we see, the more indifferent we become to it.
- You sayin' we should seek trouble?
- No, but it does help if we've had our fair share of it. I think it was Stalin who once said: 'you kill one person, and it's a tragedy. You kill 1,000,000, it becomes a statistic'. That says a lot about us humans.
- Odd thing the human mind.
- No my friend, odd thing the human heart... hand me a cigarette will you.