Material prosperity cannot solve our problems.

Question from the Internet:

“Is material prosperity the answer to the world’s problems?”

If it were, if we could provide prosperity and equality to all by chasing constant quantitative growth and ever-growing consumption, cranking up our production and energy usage to ever-higher levels, we would already be in a perfect world.

After all, modern human society is only about accumulating material wealth and possessions. We measure even human beings according to their monetary worth and bank balances. We measure how we are doing and how healthy a nation is by GDP figures and stock exchange performance. We think everything has to look shiny new, and we must constantly change, rebuild, and rearrange everything to prove we are doing fine.

In our times, we have completely forgotten what life is and what can make people truly happy and content. In our “modern societies”, we are chasing artificial and plastic goals and dreams that do not make us happy — but to the contrary. We are more unhappy, empty, and depressed than ever, even if we have much more than previous generations and more than we need.

True life and true happiness are based on positive, mutually responsible, and mutually complementing human connections, as it used to be when we still knew what family meant. Moreover, in a globally integrated and interdependent world, even the simplest comprehension of problems — let alone their solution — depends on such “family-like”, mutually responsible and mutually complementing connections and cooperation when we care for each other as much as we care for ourselves.

Learning how to rebuild our mutual interconnections based on the classical family model — or as Nature’s finely balanced and mutually integrated system works — is the solution to the global world’s problems.