Thou shall not covet thy neighbor's goods

    So why is being covetous so wrong? In our modern world, aren't we encouraged to insist that if our neighbor, friend, brother or sister gets a new car, then we need one also? If they get the newest and most sophisticated cell phone, than don't we absolutely need one as well? And how can we possibly live with a two-year-old HD TV when our friends are now getting 3D HD TVs? We are led to believe that the best thing we can do for our economy is to consume, consume, consume, and then do some consuming. 
    Of course, consuming a lot will boost the economy for a while, but then what? What happens when we start running out of natural resources to make all that stuff that we absolutely have to buy? And what happens when we run out of places to dump all of last years stuff to make room for this years stuff? The movie Wall-E shows one likely scenario if we keep it up: a planet that become one large garbage dump where nothing can live. Is that what we want? 
    We need to stop looking at short term fixes that create long term problems with the attitude that once those problems arrive, we can come up with new short term fixes. We can't come up with short term fixes forever and we are destroying the planet with that attitude. 
    More importantly, of course, is that this covetous, consumerist attitude is not helping our spiritual growth at all. Besides the fact that we are spending too much time shopping and playing with our new gadgets so that we have little time left for our spiritual side, there is also the problem that damaging radiation from these devices, as well as pollution and radiation from the manufacturing and shipping of them, harms us physically and lowers our energy and vibration rate making spiritual growth more difficult.