Here’s the thing: one day you are going to die. It is not going to matter if you were homecoming king your senior year or how flashy your Mercedes-Benz convertible was, you’ll die just the same as a poor man.
Society loves to paramount fictional ideas of happiness such as luxurious Rolex watches or Gucci handbags, little do they know that money is merely an escape.
An escape from the pain, from the daily insecurities that make us human, and most of all an escape from who we really are as people. Wealth masks the flawed qualities we have and acts as compensation in order to set our conscious mind at ease.
We tell ourselves “well it’s okay if I get wasted this weekend as long as I still pull my 4.0 and keep my letter for varsity.” Or, “It’s alright if the relationship I have with my spouse and kids is incredibly unhealthy as long as I still have my million dollar home and HD plasma screen television at the end of the day.
And according to the world this mentality is correct. It is excellent moral fiber to commit sin, adultery and lies, as long as you appear to have it all together materialistically on the outside.
The truth is these people are dying inside, they are so focused on the accumulation of worldly pleasure and pseudo success that they lose sight of everything that has ever truly mattered to them.
There has to be something more to this life than the egotistical world that Forbes magazine billboards as happiness. There must be something that levels out the corruption of this world and makes every triumph worth the price and sacrifice it took to get there.
After 16 years of living and being certain I knew it all, it took me until right now to realize that I know nothing about this world. I have no idea what will happen today, tomorrow, or 30 years from now. But the one thing I have always known is that when it comes down to it, at the end of the day, the only thing that will always remain is love.
It is not about what high paying white collar job you make your living at for eight hours a day, it is about what you come home to at night that validates true happiness.
That is because true joy does not come from a pay raise or a flamboyant sports car; in fact this greedy cancerous mentality of Americans is what is destroying love all together.
I have always believed that everything that was worth it in my life was worth fighting to the last slammed car door, the last painful tear and to the last undeserving promise of forgiveness.
Every horrible circumstance I was sure I could never get through became incredibly worthwhile the day I found love. It is the strongest verb in the human language. It has the immense strength to completely wash away every worldly materialistic desire you have, because you know that you have everything you could ever need.
Sometimes people grow up and forget about what it was that left them smiling as they fell asleep or how simply holding the person you love’s hand made every problem melt away. Unfortunately, that is when people stop living for love and start living for themselves.
This tragic truth is the reason the world has drawn its attention from everything that has ever truly mattered. It is the reason people on their death bed are cursing at themselves because they wished they could go back and say I love you more. It’s the reason so many well off surgeons and doctors finally come to realize that they have pushed all their relationships aside and spent their whole life chasing a worthless green piece of paper.
That is why love will always outweigh money, because if you never take the chance at living for love you will never really take a chance at living at all.