A topic that came up with my roommate as I chatted with her after class was the fact that there is such a grey area in the middle of the wealth spectrum.  We briefly touched on in this idea during the discussion led by Mercedes and Dr. Dharmas, but it is a difficult topic to navigate.

It is easy to say that the consumerism of the financially rich is superfluous and wasteful, but where does one draw the line?  This is something that I feel is difficult to define clearly, both within society and within my own life.   On one extreme end of the spectrum, it is easy to say that someone purchasing a Bugatti Veyron is inordinately wasteful and that such a car is not at all necessary, and on the other extreme that someone barely able to afford rice is completely justified in buying meat every now and then, but what about the middle ground?  What about the quotidian purchases of every day, middle class people?  How are those divided into wants and needs?

I find that it can be hard to delineate between wants and needs.  More often than not, especially in our society, the “wants” override what is really necessary.   For instance, SUV’s and trucks seem excessively large and wasteful for city driving, but some people may consider such vehicles to be “needs” as opposed to “wants” in life.

Interestingly, when I came home from class, I was looking a word up on Dictionary.com, and there was an icon advertising “Word of the Day!”  It is not something that I have ever bothered clicking on before, despite the fact that I use the site frequently.  For whatever reason, I decided, out of curiosity in that moment, to see what it was.  The word was “Desiderata”, meaning “things wanted or needed”.

Desiderata

 Desiderata is a plural noun, with the singular form desideratum, meaning “things wanted or needed”: “Happily-ever-after” and “eternal love” appear to be the desiderata of the current generation to whom “fat chance” say those of us who are older, wiser and more curmudgeonly.

For many, the word desiderata most often evokes the famous poem by Max Ehrmann, written in 1927 and often referred to simply as Desiderata, without attribution or quotation marks. The poem begins with oft-quoted the lines, “Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, / and remember what peace there may be in silence.”

Though the poem has achieved a mythic quality and a near-spiritual significance for some, it was not well known until the 1970s when it was made into hugely popular posters and sound recordings.  – dictionary.com