The Shifting Sands of Wealth and Status
A thousand years ago, the utmost aspiration of a human being was a piece of land and a few heads of cattle. This was the ideal wealthy person of that era.
The greatest dream of that wealthy person was a well-groomed carriage pulled by a horse, with which he would enter the society of nobles and the fashionable elite.
Today, we call someone who owns a carriage and a horse a "coachman," and in our view, he is one of the lower classes.
As for the fashionable and the prominent, they replaced land with buildings, then replaced buildings with companies, then replaced companies with just a ledger of bonds or a checkbook the size of a pocket—just capital that generates itself by contributing to any project.
The stable of livestock ended, replaced by a garage of Mercedes cars. Then the matter of the garage ended, and the rich left it for the commoners and the lower class.
And one of them came to own a private plane or a marina for yachts or a ship.
Tomorrow, planes will become the property of the poor, and wealthy and prominent people who own rockets, spacecraft, and satellites will appear, and a "weekend" trip will become a late dinner on Mars.
The Democratization of Yesterday's Luxuries
Time has turned, and people have moved from one state to another with strange speed, and the dreams of the past have now become available to everyone.
And the pepper and cardamom that ships used to carry from India via the Cape of Good Hope on perilous voyages fraught with danger, to be weighed in gold and placed in treasuries with jewels and would only appear on the tables of millionaires.
Similarly, the Indian silk handkerchiefs that we used to read about in the homes of lords in the novels of Zola and Balzac—all of this has come down to be within reach of the common people.
And pepper and cardamom are now the spices of the poor.
Silk was driven out of the market by nylon, Dacron, and Terylene, so its price dropped to half a lira per handkerchief, and it became an affordable adornment for servants and shop workers. Any person with a simple income level can now obtain many of the luxuries that my grandmother and grandfather dreamed of and salivated over.
The Paradox of Progress: Persistent Unhappiness
Nevertheless, misery exists, and unhappiness is still the norm, and complaints continue at all levels. The columns of newspapers, songs, books, radio news, the gloomy, frowning faces of people in the street, their constant bickering, and their narrow-mindedness about everything bear witness to this.
Nothing that man imagined would make him happy has made him happy. He barely possessed what he dreamed of before he became indifferent to it and sought something else. He is always looking at what is in the hands of others, completely oblivious to what is in his own hands. He forgets his wife and desires his neighbor's wife, even though his own wife is sweeter and more beautiful. But it is the desire that is never satisfied, whose appetite is always renewed and whose craving opens up to every forbidden and unknown thing.
Philosophical and Religious Perspectives on Desire
This is why Buddha established his religion on killing desire and getting rid of it as the cause of misery. And there is no salvation from misery except by getting rid of desire, killing it, and reaching a state of inner tranquility that is indifferent to everything and abstains2 from all desires.
And God reveals the truth to us in a deeper way in the Quran, saying that He created the world with this nature and characteristic: it is "temporary enjoyment."
(("The life of this world is but a temporary enjoyment."))
And "temporary enjoyment" is a consumed pleasure that expires. It is one of the characteristics of the world, as its Creator willed it, that all its pleasures are consumed, expire, and die the moment they are born.
In every pleasure is the germ of its demise.
Boredom, weariness, and habit soon kill it.
This is the nature that God willed for the world because He intended it to be a dwelling of transition, not a dwelling of permanence. And that is why He made every pleasure without permanence and without stability. Because He did not intend these pleasures to be true pleasures, but rather a mere test of the mettle of souls—just a stimulus by which courage, nobility, chastity, the truthfulness of the truthful, and the sincerity of the sincere are tested.
The Path to True Contentment
And the one who realizes this will rest completely and will stop this hysteria that takes him out of one desire only to throw him into another, and leads him from one craving only to throw him into the furnace of another craving, and drags him from one madness only to cast him into another madness.
He will find peace and rest, and he will try to tame himself, purify his soul, cleanse his heart, and work for the afterlife that God promised to all His prophets—that it will be the world where pleasure is real, and pain is real.
And he will not regret what he will miss of the pleasures of this world, because he knows perfectly well, through experience and practice, that they are deceptive pleasures that slip through the fingers like a mirage. And he has read history and knows that the wealth of Qarun, according to the current calculation, does not exceed several hundred pounds in copper currency. And thus all his treasures were estimated in sterling. And how many people own hundreds of pounds now and complain of poverty and curse the day they were born, even though, according to history, they are richer than Qarun?
The Enduring Illusion of Material Wealth
It is the eternal deception.
You dream of owning the land, but then the land owns you and dedicates you to its service.
You imagine that money will free you from need, but then money opens the doors to more demands and thus leads to more need. And every time you earn a million, you need three million to guard and secure that million.
And the vicious cycle turns without end.
And this is the nature of our lying world in which we are tested.
All of us know this, and yet we never learn.