What Do We Spend Apart From Money?
We spend anything and everything ruthlessly. This attitude we show towards money is reflected in everything in our lives. We consume and increase the dopamine level of our brain, although this is perfectly normal. It can have dire consequences, as we keep wanting more each time with the changes made by the consumption culture in our behaviours and habits.
Have you ever thought about your behaviour pattern in terms of spending your relationships, time, sleep, health, effort and opportunities that come your way?
How Can We So Easily Consume Things That Are So Priceless?
The fact that we try to consume many things that are too valuable to be bought with money is directly related to how we consume materials, namely the mentality of materialism. Materialism in moral philosophy is a worldview that sees only useful and pleasurable things worth attaining. When examining human facts such as history and society, this philosophy resorts to reasons based on a material basis rather than attributing a purpose or aspiration to them. In other words, according to the materialist point of view, the source of our every behaviour thought, and emotion is material and concrete ‘things’. The psychology of consumption and spending behaviour Behind our ‘crazy’ consumption habits and our constant desire to pay is the increase in the number of things we have or can have and our belief that they will never run out.
Knowing that unlimited water, food, money, and items and many people push us to consume these outnumbered things. What we are unaware of in a world where production is so fast and everything is easily accessible is that our time on earth is limited. While we believe we live in a micro-scale paradise of unlimited resources, the planet’s resources and time are limited. Although the world is full of sustainable resources, the increase in human population causes an increase in demand and the number of everything consumed. For this reason, as the number of things we can consume increases with production on request, we enter a cycle where we think consuming and gaining appreciation as we finish is necessary.
Well, as we get into the consumption culture and develop habits for spending, what do we spend in our lives that are too valuable to be measured with money?
We Spend Our Relationships
Have you ever considered how many friends you have on your social media accounts? Maybe you have thousands of followers, perhaps hundreds of friends. But when it comes to true friendships and meaningful relationships, most of us don’t have, and can’t possibly have, close friends with more than one or two. We also act with a worldly point of view regarding friendships that require effort and sacrifice, and we avoid investing in people. When we work with the perspective of ‘There are hundreds of people who can take their place anyway’, we focus on establishing superficial relationships that do not require effort and sacrifice. We can easily remove them from our lives at the first problem we experience without worrying about losing the people close to us. For this reason, we become lonely in crowds, and the more we spend our meaningful relationships and the people who care about us, the more isolated we become.
We Spend Our Time
Undoubtedly, the only thing whose value cannot be measured with anything for every living creature on earth is time. Do you ever think about how you spend your time that cannot be bought with money and cannot be taken back? The uncertainty of how much time we will spend on earth is one of the things that makes time even more valuable. The value of the next few hours may be invaluable if we knew that we would die within these hours, but when we think there are many more years ahead, the time we waste may not mean much. Therefore, assuming we have a long life ahead of us, we can easily destroy our time on unnecessary things without realizing their value.
We Spend Our Sleep
In a life order in which we are busy and constantly busy, perhaps the most thing we spend in the triangle of sleep – socialization – work is our sleep time. We steal from our bedtime and try to meet with our friends, go to bed later and wake up earlier to work harder. At the same time, sleep is one of the most necessary resources for our body and mind to renew and rest. As a result, we should not be so careless about spending it to lead a more satisfying and happy life physically, mentally and spiritually. Sleep is our brain’s way of cleaning itself, vital for quality sleep.
We Spend Our Love and Effort
Insatiability and the rise of our expectations cause us to consume emotions more quickly and thoughtlessly, as in everything else. We focus on our demands and needs instead of making sacrifices and efforts in our relationships with the people we love and those who love us. We attribute more meaning to expectations such as wealth, appearance, expensive clothes, and career than the value of the feeling of love, and we can easily waste this feeling. Instead of focusing on the positive aspects of the people in front of us, we seek to find perfection with the thought of ‘I can evaluate better options’, and we can devalue feelings such as love and affection.
We Spend Our Opportunities
In an endless sea of possibilities, we live our lives with our minds constantly focused on what we can’t choose, not what we can pick and have. Having more job options, being surrounded by more people, getting more attention or having more people willing to share their love with us brings dissatisfaction and the inability to evaluate the opportunities that come our way properly. We are not afraid of losing because we have many options, so we look for the better without taking a chance on the opportunities that come our way.
