Why do we all want more and more and more?

Speak for yourself. I want less and a whole lot less of it!! More money only means more grief. Take everything but my guitars!!

1 material posession leads to another. We get bored of material things eventually and start to want other things.

If I have something, I use it. I get rid of stuff I don’t use.

We don’t.

All of us don’t.

I want more of what’s important in life.
I donate what I don’t use around the home. I tend to toss stuff once a year.

You just haven’t found what you love. You want more and more and more b/c you are looking to satisfy a feeling, and it is not satisfied, so you move to the next thing, and then the next.

One day, when you find your passion, you won’t worry so much about everything else.

American advertising brainwashing is the usual reason.

Hungry Ghosts
In Tibetan Buddhism Hungry Ghosts (Sanskrit: pretas) have their own realm depicted on the Bhavacakra and are represented as teardrop or paisley-shaped with bloated stomachs and necks too thin to pass food such that attempting to eat is also incredibly painful. Some are described as having “mouths the size of a needle’s eye and a stomach the size of a mountain”. This is a metaphor for people futilely attempting to fulfill their illusory physical desires.
~Wiki

Please don’t include me in “we all.” I am trying, as I have said before, to dispossess myself of many of my possessions. They break, need to be dusted, and block my beautiful views.

@Zaku – “American advertising brainwashing is the usual reason.”

Explain why the phenominom of wanting more and more occurs in nations outside of America if “American advertising brainwashing” is the usual reason. :)

Do you want the real reason?

It’s because humans rely on status in order to gain access to the greatest number of successful offspring. Stuff shows others how successful your are, and therefore how good you would be at either bearing children or at providing for children.

The philosophical stuff merely seeks to change the grounds for measuring status, and as such, I’m all for it. I don’t know if it’s a shift that will ever be made, though. It’s so much easier to count stuff. And stuff does make life easier, too.

@wundayatta: Certainly some stuff makes life easier, but too much stuff is burdensome.

I am trying to possess less. But I sure like gadgets.

almost everything i own, except this computer i bought last week, is from the trash or recycling, or a thrift store, and it’s just fine for me. :) i guess i wasn’t targeting, saying that everyone is like that….....but in america, we have so so much more than we deserve.

I could add that I shop at thrift stores, kijiji, ebay and I only wanted more clothes because I got so blinkin’ fat.

One of my favorites quotes-

We tend to forget that happiness doesn’t come as a result of getting something we don’t have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have. ~Frederick Keonig

(just wanted to share)