Bali and Scientology

I conduct an interview with several Balinese who were born in the 70s, and all of those interviewees agreed on one thing; they used to be happier.

Today, I accidentaly opened a website about Scientology.org. As many of you know, Tom Cruise has been a devotee of Scientology. The site's explanation on quality of life has all the words that I need to say regarding the source of today's Balinese feeling of 'we used to be happier'.

Scientology says:

Thanks to scientific and technical advances over the last hundred years, most people today are materially wealthier than their forefathers. Yet, by their own accounts, the improvement in the quality of their lives has not matched their material gains.

In fact, it may be argued that people once were happier and more fulfilled. For some, material affluence breeds anxiety, a gnawing fear that if someone doesn’t take away their hard-earned acquisitions, the end of their days will prematurely arrive to finish the job. Others find death easier to face than a lifetime of assembly-line slavery, while most, in a less dramatic fashion, simply buckle down to lives of quiet desperation. 

Another well said observation regarding what happening within our society delivered by Aldous Huxley, that I totally agree. 

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited -

I thought we are getting smarter, we are getting more and more distracted by unnecessary needs. I have always believe, or perhaps part of me still remember a fact, that people can fly and travel, literally, without moving, then.

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