Summary Of Howard C. Cutler's Inner Contentment

Raphael Ohazurike
Dr. Jamil
English 1302
March 23rd 2015. The True Antidote for Greed is Contentment
In Howard C. Cutler’s “Inner Contentment,” which was published in the “Art of Happiness” in 1998, -an American writer and psychiatrist- write about his argument with the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, on human’s desire for material acquisition. In the conversation, Cutler asks Dalai Lama to speak on desire and the Dalai starts by segregating desire into two terms, the positive and negative desire. The former is the reasonable desire that does not comes with trouble and is right for the surrounding circumstances while the latter is the unreasonable desire that tends to cause decline in our mutual affection for our society and our bank accounts
Even if they do not admit it, these same people still behave as though it were true. More money means you can have what you want and do what you want. The house you dream of? It is yours. The new car you desire? Here are the keys. Why should money bring the feeling of self-satisfaction? If we should view life as a movie, we notice the sole purpose of our life is to get an education as we get older so that we can be able to get a job and make a living by earning enough money. So there it is the answer to those questions. Basically, what we tend to do in our whole life time is to earn money to survive to our taste of satisfaction. I do understand that some people believe in the “myself before another” principle which Cutler expatiated on when he said, “having a more expensive car than your neighbors might be a problem for them –they might be jealous and so on- but having a new car would give you, yourself a feeling of satisfaction and enjoyment.” (Bedau
Sometimes, I spend money on things beyond my financial budget, and sometimes I just charged it, whether I had the money to pay for it or not. (I am lucky, though, because I have never had expensive tastes. I shudder to think where I would be if I did.) Never has a purchase made me a happier person, and sometimes after the newness has worn off, I even felt a great sense of regret that I purchased something that I did not use nearly as much as I thought I would. Let us look for a strategy we would use to conquer this feeling of self-satisfaction when it comes to desire. One can start by ignoring the urge to get things that are not essential and wait for a couple of weeks, if one truly needs it, it may still be a priority in two weeks. If not, the urge to buy it usually will fade fairly