Today we live in the world of plenty, yet we never have enough. 

Plenty of food, plenty of entertainment, plenty of opportunities and plenty of wasted time. So much so that we hardly find a few minutes to look into ourselves and see what we have become while being pulled under the manic tides of social norms. 

Nowadays, in developed societies, even the poor live lives that a few centuries ago were available only to a privileged few. However, the standard of poverty is always defined by what wealth is considered in that culture. If the standard of wealth was to be measured in one's capacity to achieve a lot with as little as possible, then poverty would be just as abundant as in our culture.

To supply the plenty for a part of the world, other parts of the world are exploited and crippled into underdevelopment. As the population rises dismally, even extreme poverty is enjoyed by plenty of people around the world, but at least there’s plenty of apathy to safeguard our plenty of comforts against their growing numbers. 

We are ever more inclined towards material pursuits, yet immaterial influences drive us. What we cannot grasp, in a literal sense, we don’t bother ourselves too much with. For this reason, we never give too much mind to the quality of the intellectual goods that we mentally consume and, as a result, we never give too much to our mind. We are more inclined to seek comforting validations through such goods rather than confront ourselves with critical thought. 

This culture of excess, that we hardly think of as such, leads to plenty of problems, plenty of pollution, plenty of waste, plenty of illnesses, and plenty of stress that never seems to be placed pragmatically but rather ends up dissipating into meaningless conflicts, either with ourselves or those around us that, to some degree, almost becomes indistinguishable. A sort of an existential handicap we encourage through our media and celebrity culture as to feel spiritually comforted with our destructive tendencies.

Plenty of issues pile up, overlooked with plenty of distractions. The more the issues grow, the more violent our distractions become. The more distracted we are, the less we are inclined to look into ourselves and see how we have grown foreign to our own nature. The more we look the more painful it becomes. 

Fearful of what we might find further within our neglected self, we feel compelled to return to our distractions, to plenty of dreams where we could dream of plenty other things. But, these are not our dreams, they are not the dreams of the self, but wishes. The dreams of the self we dispense with as soon as we can, hoping that with them also our growing frustrations and anxieties will go. Dreams that cryptically hold plenty of answers to our relationship with ourselves and our surrounding world, answers that conflict with our wishes and the many ideals we strongly believe.

Behind the plenty of selfish beliefs that makes us live apart from the world, sits hidden the self that is a part of the world.