Our Needs and Wants

Every time I watch Castaway (for those who haven't seen it it's a whole movie acted by Tom Hanks and a ball called Wilson) I re-evaluate my life. This person was castaway on an island in the pacific ocean, where he had nothing and despite this he lived for five years. Okay, No cloths and no food, no coffee, no cigarettes! but he lived. He fended for his food and fought the  calamities of life with the rain, wind, storms, vicious insects and animals. He didn't need a doctor to treat his ailments nor did he need a dentist to extract his tooth, he operated on himself and extracted his own teeth.  He ate raw fish, and survived like a tree in the middle of the desert  Look at us, we accumulate everything, we have cupboards filled with cloths, cabinets filled with all sorts of goodies, bookshelves filled with books, each one of us may have a minimum of two cars, may have couple of laptops, a desktop, few TV's, 50 pairs of shoes, a lot of jewellery, I am not even going to mention the plates and home appliances, as someone will turn around and tell me off.  Think how much of these things did we actually need? How many of those shoes did we actually wear? Do we change bags with every outfit or we make do with one, but still buy more whenever we find a brand on sale? Do we really need all of these things? Or we just buy them because we want them?  I am not saying that we should be Chuck and live "Bearly" as if we are on an island, that could benefit some of us completely, what I am trying to say here is that life needs us to stop, breath and think! What do we want that thing for? And why should we listen to all of that commercialism and get hooked to the many tricks the shop keepers use on us so we believe that we need those stuff.  Not sure if you remember the movie Jungle book, when the bear sang that song "Bear necessities, the bear necessities" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ogQ0uge06o&feature=youtube_gdata_player) what the bear was trying to tell Mowgli is that he can live happy wherever he is. In high rises or in the jungle.  Why am I writing this? Well one of our people is on hunger strike for 60 days, and this blog is for his support.  I will give up one thing for a day, Coffee. I will see if I survive.