“Success?” What really is this god we pursue?

Ralph Waldo Emerson letterpress broadside

I just finished a column by Paul Rosenberg in his “Freeman’s Weekly” online publication.  He offers some challenging perceptions and asks some penetrating questions.  If you get a chance to look it up, I would encourage you to do so.  I can’t find a way to link to it, so you are on  your own there.

The piece is titled “Cornerstones of Oppression: The Upper Middle Class.”

A couple excerpts from the column will give a bit of the piece’s flavor:

Buy luxury goods: I recently saw a gift registry for an upper middle class wedding where the bride and groom requested olive spoons.  Yes, olive spoons!  Such purchases are simply status tokens, the UMC’s part of “keeping the economy going.”  More than that, these people simply don’t know what to do with their money–most of them have no real purpose in their lives beyond ‘success.’ And so, they default to status tokens . . .

Is That All There Is?  This is the question I’d like upper middle class people to ask themselves.  Is getting and displaying stuff the sum total of life? . . . There is more to life than playing a role in a game, even a pampered role. If we sell our souls to status, we are fools, and upper middle class people are able to be more than fools.”

Check the full column out.  Good stuff there.

Until later. . .

 

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