People who reject God’s love try to find instant happiness in very predictable ways. It’s the reason that in 2022 advertising agencies alone raked in 68 billion in revenue. They offer innovative solutions to solve the profound emptiness humans face by promising the secret formula to achieve happiness. They focus advertising on the same subjects; improving health and looks, quick wealth strategies, pleasure, honor and/or more sexually intense relationships.
We are told that happiness can be found instantly in the form of the newest version of a consumer product such as a mobile phone (with one more camera lens) or a car that can steer itself (while they clap their hands going down the highway according to the commercials). Others try to find happiness in their work especially when they get that promotion with a title that comes with a bigger office or better yet a corner office. Others still try to find happiness in the novelty of a new lover.
The news is full of sad stories about the most famous, affluent, and powerful people who have literally anything, everything and almost anyone available to them at their fingertips who, despite the stuff, often lead unhappy lives that end up in drug abuse, depression, divorce or worse.
The human problem is that once the novelty of “new” wears off we are left with what we had at the beginning, a profound unhappiness, an emptiness and restlessness. We try to stay in front of all that by novelty, but it eventually catches up with us.
No one in the right mind seeks to be miserable. Our constant seeking and coming up unhappy time and time again should be a sign to us that God alone can fill the emptiness we feel in our hearts. The key is to seek happiness in the right places but we’ve never been told a hundred times a day through advertising that our eternal happiness lies solely with knowing, loving, and serving God and by loving and serving our neighbor which deeply nourishes the soul while the temporal excitement of that new _________ (fill in the blank) eventually fades.
