Nothing Verifies Your Materialistic Pursuits As a Small Town Visit

When you grow up in such an environment, your baseline will be a local maximum of that small city.

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Needs and wants are much different.

On the one side of the spectrum, you have things that are not necessary for living while on the other end there are things necessary to staying alive and/or doing it in decent conditions.

When we move towards the prior side of the spectrum we enter the neverending chase for, what seems to be, fulfillment.

Yet, when we put that pursuit into perspective, its point quickly turns blurry and we start to question whether it makes sense.

For people who grew up in a relatively small town or a village, this concept will be easy to grasp.

No matter where you grow up, at some point, you learn about people who live on both sides of the spectrum.

They are people who have plenty and those who live below the acceptable level.

These two extremes create a certain benchmark that will later help you find yourself on this platform, as well as, help you decide what to pursue.

Of course, no one wants to “chase less” so we naturally gravitate towards riches.

These are the people who’ll be a baseline of what’s the goal.

But it turns out these “goals” are only local maximums that can be quickly dismantled when put in perspective.

And that’s the role of a small town.

When you grow up in such an environment, your baseline will be a local maximum of that small city.

Then when you move to a bigger city (let’s say from 70k population to 700k) the “goal” will be swapped with a current town’s local maximum.

What you aspire to will change as you’ll see new riches, new pursuits, new dimensions of success, and the new “goal”.

You quickly forget about what it meant to be successful in your home town.

Well, what do they know, right?!

They’ve seen 💩! (wish this poo was also in a thug version)

But then you go back to that small town.

For a visit, to your parents or to see old friends.

And you meet the local “goal” again.

You see that it’s no different from what you’ve seen.

The scale is different but the “goal” really isn’t.

At your small town a guy who’s “someone” drives the newest BMW and looks like a cheap version of The Rock.

The bigger city guy will drive Ferrari while his clothes will scream “I don’t care what you think”.

The more you upgrade the higher the scale will go but you’ll always run into a local maximum.

Materialistic pursuits only “make sense” when you’re fighting for the status. The problem is that status games themselves are doomed.

Going for the zero-sum game as a leading force of your life’s success is the runway to failure. At the end of the day, there’ll always be someone ready to replace you.

Your “success” is temporary and the longer you fight for it the close you’re to losing the pedestal.

Whenever you catch yourself in the pursuit of what seems as a want, put it into perspective.

Am I doing it for the fulfillment of myself?

Or is it the local maximum that I’m really chasing?

Even better, visit a small town. Visit a village.

See the local maximum there and start laughing about how stupid you were that you joined such a rat race.