My last post was not a shot at folks who claim to be 'doing it tough.' There are undoubtedly people with large mortgages, loss of employment, illness, divorce or separation and so forth who are struggling and have been pushed into their lot by circumstances, many outside their immediate control. And of course there are many people who live on welfare payments or who have fallen into homelessness, for whom the struggle has merely increased. They have always had it and likely will always have it.

My observations are society-wide. Affluence, the steady increase in the standard of living, has brought with it a mindset of prosperity in which having nice things and doing nice things are just how it is and how it will always be. Politicians of all-stripes have encouraged this expectation, fearing that the electorate will not tolerate anything less, or that the opposing party will not exploit any weaknesses in the rhetoric.

And let's not talk about the obsession with property prices. The almost daily serving of property news seems to me to be a good metric for measuring the underlying anxiety that consumerism must surely produce.

I think that we will learn the hard way that acquisitiveness does not create meaning in our lives. Rather it just clutters and confuses, leaving little joy in a long trail of things that promised much but delivered very little.