Friday, December 12, 2008

How Christmas creates unhappiness

My strong opposition to Christmas is totally unrelated to its religious meaning. Christmas as it is popularly celebrated has little to do with religion but everything to do with merchandising. From the standpoint of Buddhist philosophy it is the worst day of the year, not on "moral" but on practical grounds: owning things makes us unhappy.

Especially in the U.S., people have been lead to believe that happiness and a good family life are tied up with the purchase of all kinds of goods. Yet the reality is that after Christmas we have a sizable increase in depression and unhappiness, as the promise we believe in fails to come true. We are not happier after Christmas. In fact, the more we have, the less likely we are to be content and happy. This outcome is totally unrelated to over-spending and debt, which only adds to and perhaps conceals the real problem.

I'm not encouraging poverty and abstinence. I am discouraging the belief that owning things has anything to do with happiness. We already know that when we own things, they own us as well. Not only do we have to make payments initially or over time, we have to take care of the things, store the things, dispose of the things, and wait in vain for the happiness to start. We have to deal with the disappointment and disillusion that follow in greater or lesser degree.

But there's always next year, while we look for storage space for our happiness-makers.