There is truth of life and if you really want to know it, you have to look at only one thing. The history of advertising.
The advertising has four basic plots.
The plots are fear, happiness, desire, and greed.
First of all, let’s deal with fear.
They use fear to tell you what could go wrong, and then they give you a solution which they won’t give you time to think about.
They will immediately produce a tangible product, something which you can actually think about and solve the problem on your own.
Before you could solve the problem on your own, they will give you a tangible product that you can spend money and buy.
This is how they use the fear of advertising.
This is how they use your fear to make you buy products.
What is happiness?
There is no such thing as happiness.
I personally believe it.
From ancient times, people have been looking for something called happiness, which is kind of a state of mind, rather than a tangible thing which you can acquire.
You can never get happiness for eternity.
It is an event which comes in your life and passes by.
If you complete something, you achieve something. It gives you happiness, but happiness is again a state of mind. It is not a tangible product.
Advertising, what they have done, is that they have routed happiness as some tangible product, which you can have by spending money and buying it in order to get the happiness.
For example, iPhone. When you get iPhone, you are very happy.
That is a happiness that they want to create because it gives you a loop of happiness where you want to do it again and again.
Every time you buy that certain product, it gives you happiness.
How do they make you buy it?
They tell you, “Now it is better and bigger and more workable,” and you think, “Last time when I bought it, I felt very happy. This time when I will buy it, I will be happier.”
You keep buying it, and it becomes a loop.
Happiness is something which they use to make you buy things that you don’t want to buy.
Third comes the desire.
Now, desire is something which you always have and will always have.
It is something that you want to achieve, but it is still in your mind, and you have to go through the process, work hard, to achieve it.
There is a path to it, but you keep thinking about the end goal in your mind.
Desire is the end goal of the things that you want to acquire or achieve.
They tell you that you can achieve it right now by just spending money, and you end up doing that.
Desire is a human weakness where they keep desiring about a certain thing, and it becomes so heavy in their mind that they now feel that they can’t live without it, and it kills them.
If someone shows anything which is remotely connected to your desire, you immediately want to have it.
Self-help books are mostly targeting these people who have extreme desires, and they fool them in the name of certain methods, like “Think and get whatever you want. They will make a list and get whatever you want. There is a frequency of your mind,” and things like that.
This fools people into believing that if you desire something, you can get it without even doing the hard work, because they know that most people do not like to do hard work.
They eliminate that process of hard work and tell you that even without hard work, you can get from point A to the point B where your desire lies by just thinking about it.
Does it give them anything back? No!
To the publisher, it does not give anything back, because selling the book is the prize.
Selling the concept is the prize that they are aiming for.
They are not aiming for you to get anything.
They are not aiming for you to think it is a scam. There are times when you keep making effort, and certainly, out of a hundred things, you might get one or two things.
Even if you have not read the book, you might get those things.
You will start to believe because your mind is a magnet which keeps connecting things.
You think that concept is working, and you keep doing more of it and buying more books out of it. That’s how they use the parasitic method of desire.
Fourth point is greed.
Now, greed is something that everyone has.
It is one of the basic sins of the human mind, and it is something for which you don’t want to make an effort and still get it.
It is kind of connected to desire.
Greed is something when you want more than you deserve, when you have a selfish desire to own something without sharing it with anyone.
Greed is also sinful because it turns you into a monster who wants to do things that you would not otherwise do if you were not having such a deep desire for the acquisition of that particular tangible thing, object, or person.
Now, I connect all these things to the truths of life because the advertising has figured out that if they can utilize all these four things properly, they can sell any products to human beings.
Human beings are insecure people, and they keep on moving forward.
They don’t have a stagnant position. They want to travel, they want to move ahead, and they want every day of their life to be better than their previous day.
This might work for them, but it is also a way to manipulate them into buying things.
I personally believe that every self-help book, every motivational speaker, article, book, or journal is doing nothing but aggravating and helping the advertising industry to sell things.
When you realize that everything comes down to selling, you understand the motives of these people and these books, and you know that it is all about selling books. They are using defects to sell these things.
The truth of life is this: there is no such thing as happiness. Your fear is mostly irrational.
Your desires are something which lies in the future, so you should not have them. If you have them, you should not be very adamant about acquiring them, like your life depends on it, because if you do that, you will be eternally in a state of perpetual unhappiness.
Certainly, you are never going to achieve happiness in your life, because happiness is not something to attain. “It is not something to attain” is a statement which is very important to understand.
Attainment means that you possess that particular thing and you won’t let it go, and it remains with you.
Happiness is no such thing. It is just a feeling which has been elevated to a level where you think that it is something that you can gain and keep with you and remain in that state for an eternal period of time, because that is what you are trying to achieve.
Coming to desire, it is something that you can have, but it is not something that you should hold.
You should always consider it as something that you want, but even if you don’t get it, your life keeps moving on.
Then there is greed. Greed is one of the most useful and useless things as well. If greed has no moral compass, it makes you do things which go against society and also against the law.
When greed works in your favor, it also is a great motivator for you to do things for your own.
I do not particularly think that selfishness is a wrong thing.
People should first live for themselves, do for themselves, and then later think about the other humanity and other people.
Greed is something which, if controlled, can take you to the heights you cannot imagine, but if not guided properly, if not mastered properly, the greed can become your destruction.