Postconsumers isn’t the only group of people out there exploring the idea of satisfaction and consumerism, or for that matter just happiness! Many people have said many brilliant things on the topic, and each week we’ll bring you one for discussion. This week’s quote of the week is:
“Since the purpose of business is to satisfy existing desires, or stimulate new ones, if everyone were genuinely happy, there would be no need for business any longer.” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a Hungarian-born psychology professor who emigrated to the United States at the age of twenty-two. He’s incredibly famous for his work on creativity, happiness and the concept of Flow. You may want to read up on Flow, because it’s the wonderful idea of the mental state in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. In other words, a state of satisfaction.
We love many of Mihaly’s quotes, but we find the one above to speak to us in particular. It’s not reasonable to expect, in reality, that there will ever be a time when there isn’t a need for business. Our entire existence is predicated on a certain degree of commerce, and always has been. However, it’s true that, increasingly, as happiness becomes more elusive, businesses look to capitalize on that by offering “stuff” and “services” and “events” that supposedly will make us happy. If we all just worked on being happy, as Mihaly says, we’d need less of that “stuff” and “services” and “events” and we’d be less beholden to business establishments.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi takes the logic of the idea to the extreme, but when we hear it said like that, it really makes sense. Get happy, get satisfied, and you’ll find yourself needing less from the industrialized business movement!
