Part Two
Chapter 1: The Eternal Questions

What do people live for?

What do people live for?

This ancient, ever-new question was debated some twenty-four hundred years ago in Greece, as recorded in Plato's Gorgias dialogue. Callicles proposed that the proper way for a man to live is to allow his desires to expand without limit, and to devise means to satisfy all his longings.

Today's residents of advanced industrial nations would appear to be true followers and devotees of Callicles. From the time of the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century, when products were first manufactured by machine, it is fair to say that people's efforts and ingenuity have been increasingly focused on how to get all the things they want—how to gratify their desires with maximum efficiency.

Twentieth-century humanity in particular, confident that material affluence was the key to happiness, began to glorify material prosperity. At the same time, people's desires have continually inflated. As society prospers and produces more and more goods, consumers come to want more and more, from personal computers to flat-screen TVs to new cars. American economist John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006), author of The Affluent Society, termed this the “dependence effect.”

One of the latest scientific marvels has made it possible to talk to virtually anyone, anywhere, while walking down the street. Now that even primary schoolchildren hold cell phones to their ears, it is hard to remember back not so long ago when few in Japan could afford even a wristwatch. Microwave cooking has vastly simplified meal preparation.