We, as human beings, are materialistic and sense indulgent slaves. This is something that most people don't think about. But they do push spirituality away, dubbing it as unimportant when compared to, say, what's on television tonight, or what's happening this weekend. It has a severe effect on familial and personal relationships too, including those with ourselves. We are lost in our oversexed, possession-dominated lives, and don't realize it because it is encouraged by the society and by the media to be like this.
I think that as we are brought up in this world, especially those of us that have been born with in the last twenty years, the importance of ownership of many possessions becomes a personal obsession. As children, we constantly have to have what the other kids have; otherwise we are unfit to even talk to. It develops into a constant ambition to always be better than our rivals. Getting an education turns into a way for us to make it to a high point in life where we"re not going to have our faces ground into the dirt by all the rich folk. This pulls us away from our internal purposes. Our dreams and goals, even when carried out, all seem to be fake because we"re accomplishing them for the wrong reasons.
In turn, materialism and excessive pleasure can certainly alter our family lives and relationships with our selves. If we"re just taking after the examples of our parents, then the whole family may be absorbed in a generational decadence of morals. And if we are just victims of the expectations of our society, then we may believe that our parents just don't understand the way we are, leading to disagreements, abandonment, and extreme bouts of depression. Our personal lives are now destroyed. But we continue the downward spiral into obsessions with other things, now trying to drown out the senses. At this point, we don't even bother to question God anymore. Spirituality is dead.