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Needs
How much stuff are you planning to carry into the new year? Neuro scientists at UCLA have produced a study that suggests that we get a good feeling from accumulating the most stuff. It is somehow related to serotonin, a chemical that is produced in the brain. It seems that the university studied 19 tribes of monkeys over a period of time and concluded that the most dominant monkeys in every single tribe had 50 more serotonin in their systems.
The connection made is that when we get stuff, serotonin is released. Somehow we feel the more stuff we have the more successful we are. This serotonin release thing contributes to the feeling that we win in life if we have a big house with rooms that we never use, two cars, a boat, clothes we rarely wear, toys with visit occasionally, and tons of gadgets, utensils, artifacts, collectibles and more money than we can spend. We could stack it all in our front yards and take a picture and declare We won!- Why? Because we collected the most stuff. In the terminology of the UCLA study, we are the dominant monkeys on our blocks.
Conversely, there is something in us that concludes that we are less successful if we get rid of some of our stuff. No serotonin is released when we throw away stuff or give it away. So we accumulate stuff and find that its hard to get rid of it.
As we prepare to enter the new year, we now have to decide how we are going to deal with all the stuff that we handled this year. Not so much the gifts received from Christmas, but the stuff that we accumulated this year.