Sometimes I feel that my work and life really bring too much drag to the pure spiritual world I pursue in my heart. I can't wait to quit my job and travel while enjoying the unparalleled scenery along the way. When I am interested, I can also sit on the lawn and set up a drawing board to describe the beautiful scenery in front of me, or set up a tripod and a SLR to leave a permanent memorial for the lingering but immediate picture in my heart and enjoy the freedom brought to my heart.
Having said that, sometimes when you really have a lot of free time, you may feel extremely at a loss. Especially during the long vacation, after my spirit has been satisfied to a considerable extent, I look around at home and think about what to do tomorrow, but I have no clue. I began to think about the cost of living in the future, the real estate, capital, career I want to own, and even how attractive other people's eyes are. I think maybe the richness of the material world is my most basic and important demand. So I began to work hard for my life, and gradually got tired of it in the great pressure and fast-paced life. ...
Repeated swaying like this will cause confusion in people's hearts, and even they don't quite understand what they want at first. The richness of spiritual life makes people feel happy, but the lack of material may lead to their own poverty and disrespect, but they will become unhappy. How to balance and decide to solve this contradiction may be a problem that many people have no time to think carefully in their busy lives.
0 1 spirit
I still remember the first time I watched China on the Tip of the Tongue 2. A story left a deep impression on me. A couple living in Beijing are tired of the inevitable work pressure and fast-paced life in big cities. They decided to quit their jobs together and move to rural Yunnan thousands of miles away, enjoying the life of doing what they want in the countryside, chatting with their neighbors and cooking every day. I had just graduated less than a year ago. Although I worked hard, the relatively comfortable life in second-tier cities made me unable to understand why the couple's decision was so extreme. In my eyes, this is a typical case of spiritual pursuit. Pursuing the spiritual level can make people do things that others can't understand, but the parties themselves can fully enjoy the spiritual pleasure brought by these behaviors, which can surpass most material stimuli.
Spiritual encouragement also has a powerful effect on the will of spiritual pursuers. This kind of thing happened to me, and it must have happened to many friends. More than a year ago, with the encouragement of my friends, I launched my own official WeChat account, focusing on the writing of food articles. Through the recommendation of the teacher's official WeChat account, every article published at the beginning is synchronized as soon as it is published. It can be said that the check-in time coincides with the time when I started writing about food. When I first received the first favorite, the first comment and the first praise on this platform, although it seemed insignificant, because I knew it was not uncommon for an article to receive dozens or even hundreds of likes on such a high-quality platform, I couldn't help but feel excited, just like a singer singing a song in a bar, pouring his emotions into the audience's heartfelt applause. A seemingly small spiritual encouragement may make a person maybe. These positive memories will make you forget some immediate difficulties and move on.
Nevertheless, there are still many difficulties and obstacles in the pursuit of spiritual pleasure, and the negative impact of these obstacles on a person is even more unacceptable than material lack. Life and reality are always unavoidable for a social person, and the spiritual ideal will not be different because it is a spiritual world rather than a material world in the process of pursuit. When encountering all kinds of obstacles and problems, people will feel confused, confused and suspicious, especially when there is a huge gap with the ideal situation, the sense of helplessness will occupy the whole mind by leaps and bounds, just as Beethoven was at a loss and painfully confused when he tried his best to create a shocking grand symphony. A few hours before the fourth movement of the ninth symphony was born, he seemed to have fallen into the abyss of impatience and helplessness. His crazy expectations and helpless grievances are all revealed in his anxious walking, sighing, stamping his feet and being almost crazy. Fortunately, the main theme of this movement was finally created, which matched the poem of the same name by the poet Schiller and was named Ode to Joy. However, many people with the same spiritual sustenance are always unknown, unhappy and even extreme because they always lack such luck or talent or inspiration.
02 substance
The complexity of human spiritual consciousness is beyond the reach of the rich material world. But matter is always the most primitive object of human desire. No one will consider other needs when he is naked and hungry, so as long as he does not lose his conscience and morality because of excessive pursuit of material things, he will generally not be cast aside or destroyed, and no one will make irresponsible remarks about those who have made a fortune from poverty by their own efforts. In Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory, life needs and security needs are two basic needs, which are basically completely related to material needs, while relatively high-level emotions, belonging, respect and self-realization needs are not necessarily related to spiritual needs. Take the highest level of self-realization demand, which to a great extent contains the desire for property. Talents begin to have a basic sense of happiness after ensuring their basic life through material acquisition. On the contrary, the material poverty caused by the extreme pursuit of spirit will make people more miserable.
Xiao Hong, one of the four talented women in the Republic of China, deeply sympathized with women, described the world with childlike innocence, and showed people what an idealist she was. It seems that she has never stopped writing, and never stopped looking forward to the ideal love songs in her heart, but it is precisely because of these pursuits of love and freedom that her life seems to be spent in poverty and running around. Except loneliness, she seems to have never lost an important partner, even before her death, but for her life, misery seems to be a label that she can't get rid of. Maybe she didn't want to do it herself. In the eyes of many readers, she will always feel sorry for such a talented writer. Excessive dependence on the spiritual world will indeed lead to neglect of material life, and the lack of material life will affect spiritual pleasure. Therefore, it is necessary to consider material satisfaction.
However, due to the extreme pursuit of material things, the original satisfaction gradually turned into boredom. As Tal Ben shachar, the teacher of positive psychology who offered the most courses in the history of Harvard University, said in his open class, in today's world, stars and successful people in many countries have sex scandals, drug abuse and even suicides. These people are rich, and they may have achieved what they want. Some people may even have done it in their own industries. The answer is that after they finally get the life they want through hard work, they think they can be happy forever, but in fact, the objective law of human happiness fluctuation has brought their happiness level back to their benchmark happiness level. When a person finds that he has tried his best to get everything that others can't get, he can't get lasting happiness inside, and he is easy to pursue abnormal happiness, such as pinning on drugs, drugs and everything that he knows will have adverse consequences, but he still has no choice. When these things eventually lead to a vicious circle, extreme things usually inevitably happen occasionally.
What is the answer?
Whether it is the spiritual world or the material world of human beings, the same thing that always flows in these two worlds-desire, remains unchanged. People have desires because the sense of gain is the main source of happiness. You will be happy to get real estate, luxury cars, money, food and other materials, and you will be happy to get spiritual wealth such as honor, respect, trust and knowledge, even more than material things.
However, according to what has been said above, we also know that no matter whether people pursue one or abandon the other, it seems that they can't achieve the goal of getting enough happiness. On the contrary, it may cause pain, frustration and even devastating consequences.
Since each of us needs both material and spiritual support, how much we need is what everyone needs to consider. Back in Professor Tal's positive psychology course, I not only got the answer to this question, but also got the seemingly ordinary but practical and effective method of how to be happier in the well-founded and colorful story of this introverted but humorous Israeli lecturer.
First of all, regarding the balance between matter and spirit, Professor Tal said that in fact, everyone can find the point of maximizing his happiness between the two extremes of pure spirit and pure material according to his own nature and the influence of the acquired environment, and pursue the life he wants most according to the ratio of spiritual and material needs. This conclusion, which has been strictly confirmed by statistical science, is also a fact. That is to say, when you desperately make money and want to become rich, you should think ahead. When your wealth exceeds, your happiness will not increase much with its growth. On the contrary, more material gains may be one of the sources of more stress and mental burden, or in other words, make you unhappy; Similarly, when you pursue your olive tree or spiritual home regardless of your food and clothing, you should consider to what extent this happiness can offset the discomfort caused by poverty, hunger and even homelessness.
Secondly, after understanding such a fact, Professor Tal also said that the above-mentioned benchmark happiness level set for everyone is a happiness level that you will always return with the passage of time no matter how sad and exciting things you encounter, that is, there are no sad memories that you can't walk away from, but there are no happy events that make you happy all your life, even if you get rich overnight, even if you love each other forever. Fortunately, people can improve their baseline happiness through some simple and effective methods. For example, we can vent our sadness by keeping a diary and telling friends, improve our happiness by simply recalling happy things, exercise for at least half an hour four times a week, hug more than 12 people every day, write thank-you letters to relatives and friends and read them in person.
Finally, Professor Tal, as a successful person who changed from unhappy to happy, was once the best squash player in the world, telling us that everyone can achieve happiness and success at the same time, that is, both material and spiritual harvests. Although there are a few poor but happy people, most people in the world, rich or poor, are at a low benchmark level of happiness. If you want to be happy and successful, you need not only the above methods, but also to overcome the tendency of perfectionism and be satisfied.
Spiritual and material needs exist more or less for every member of society, and the real desire for such needs should be that people follow their inner goals. No matter what kind of person you want to be in the future, please believe that it is never wrong to follow your heart, because your heart will always be your best friend. ...