The west (North America and Europe) is the richest region in the world. You get what you strive for; and as they have striven for prosperity and development, they have got it. But this obsession with wealth has had effects on their psyche. The sole mission of most of the people there is to get prosperous and thus they focus all of their energy and their resources to this end.

Money and Happiness

Is it good to be materialistic? No it is not. There are many things that complete life and being financially stable is just one of those many things. You need to have happy relationships, a happening social life, an engaging job and interesting hobbies. All these factors contribute to make a person happy. Studies have repeatedly shown that just being wealthy is not enough to keep you happy. Okay there is a certain level of wealth that you need to attain to be secure and fulfill your basic needs, but after that level, having more money never translates into being happier. After that level, other things become more important to individuals.

Then why do people think that money is happiness. It is due to a fundamental belief that you can buy anything with money. With money, yes you can buy luxuries and afford vacations but they cannot make you happy as long as you don't have a healthy and enjoyable lifestyle.

Money and Status

Another factor that makes people in the west materialistic is that social standings in the west are solely based upon how wealthy the person is. This leads to a frantic mania to get rich as quickly as you can. With money, it is assumed, you can have a social status, luxuries and an impressive personality. This is all an illusion. Money brings with it its own problems too. Studies have shown that often millionaires are more depressed that people who earn average wages. This might be due to added pressures of handling businesses for rich businessmen or handling the media for famous stars. This means that the millions in the banks do not contribute to make you happier. What is the point of such wealth?

Tag: Does money make you happy?

The number of people who smoke cigarettes in this world is an astonishing 1.1 billion. Some 15 million cigarettes are bought everyday and 5 trillion of them are manufactured and sold around the world every year. Considering the health hazards surrounding smoking, these are alarming statistics. Tobacco use accounts for nearly 30% of all cancer deaths and it is the cause of 87% of the lung cancer deaths in men and 70% in women. There is a need to look for alternatives to stop people from smoking cigarettes. There is an alternative to smoking that one can try, and this is described below.

Electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes as they are generally known, have stormed the market recently by claiming to offer a much safer smoking experience. The companies producing these e-cigarettes claim that they are not as harmful as cigarettes. They claim that as e-cigarettes supply nicotine in vapor forms as opposed to smoke, is safer because of no combustion. In this way, smoking e-cigarettes is a lot safer than smoking normal cigarettes.

This claim has been tested by many studies and results have shown that these claims cannot be regarded as true. E-cigarettes, as it is claimed, are as dangerous as cigarettes and are in no way safer because the nicotine is still being supplied from the tobacco.

It seems that anything that claims to be safe and yet imitates smoking is too good to be true. Smoking is bad for health and bad for the society generally and it has to be rooted out entirely. For this purpose, some techniques are in place for smokers who want to quit smoking.

Alternative to E-Cigarettes

People looking to overcome smoking can look for medical advice. There is a treatment in place called Nicotine Replace Therapy (NRT) where nicotine nasal spray, nicotine

inhaler and other medications are used to control the urge to smoke. A smoker is attracted to smoking not just by the drug but by the physical and mental urges to smoke. If the effect of the drug is recreated through medication, then the physical and mental addiction can somehow by controlled first. Once this is in check, then the smoker can slowly decrease the intake of nicotine to the point where it can be completely controlled and smoking can be quit as a habit.

The easiest way to not be a smoker is to not start it. Once you have got a taste for it, it's hard to resist. But still, there is hope for smokers. If you are determined to quit it, you can.

As feminism has had its course and as college education has become common among girls, the family system has changed as a side effect, especially in the west. In the older days, the man of the family was supposed to earn while the woman's prime duty was to look after the household. This meant that the woman or the mother had a greater amount of time to spend with the children and spend looking after her husband; this lead to greater bonding among the family members. It is still the same in most of the households here in the east. But, in the west, now as educated women have joined the men in the workplaces, it has signalled a titanic shift in the family systems of old. The number one priority for many women now is their careers and family has taken a back seat. Some 58.6% percent of women aged above 16 are working in the US as compared to only 29% in India. This shows that the women in the east generally tend to stay at home and invest more of their time in their families compared to their western counterparts.

Is this a Good Thing?

Economic statistics show that the participation of women in the workplace strengthens the economy. But this comes at the cost of family life. The kids do not get as much care from a working woman as they can get from a stay-at-home woman when growing up. This extra care can often mean the difference between the kid becoming a well-groomed, responsible citizen or becoming an unkempt, irresponsible one who is a burden on the state and the society.

How Family Life Helps Everyone

Family is the closest a person comes to anyone in his or her life. When a person does not have a family he or she is close with, then the person does not have anyone to share his or her feelings with in times of stress and fatigue. This often results in depression and loneliness which are some prime causes of unhappiness among people in the west. Despite being financially stable, these people cannot find happiness due to the lack of a happy family life. When the family is happy and close to each other, then they share their feelings and experiences with each other, and help each other out of life's challenges.

Therefore, it is undoubtedly important that women contribute to the economy and the society by working in the work-places, but family life should not be sacrificed for this end. Family should still be the number one priority for women.

Wimbledon is arguably the most prestigious tennis tournament of the year. Thousands turn up every year in the London courts, waiting for whole days to get tickets and the final of the tournament has the same number of fans outside the courts as are inside of it; those poor fans who could not get their hands on tickets, watching the match on the big screen outside of it. The traditional white clothing of Wimbledon against the green grass courts is an iconic view of a tennis master class.

A Clash of Titanic Events

But this year, Wimbledon has clashed, as it does every four years, with another sporting event of an even bigger scale; The FIFA World Cup. 32 teams from all over the world have gathered in Brazil to play for the ultimate prize in football.

FIFA World Cup

The FIFA World Cup is the world's second biggest sporting event- second only to the Olympics. As the World Cup kicks off, hype on the media and social media has soared. With every match shown live on TV and the media providing live coverage before and after the match, this event has the attention of everyone. News channels show the keep the viewers updated about every goal, and the football fever has truly gripped the world.

If the mainstream media wasn't enough, the World Cup is also the most discussed thing on Twitter and Facebook. Since the start of the event, it has been mentioned 70 million times and it is expected that some 3.2 billion people will watch the World Cup on TV, making it the most watched sporting event ever.

The World Cup's Long Shadow

In this scenario, the Wimbledon 2014, although still important, is being overshadowed by the FIFA World Cup. There has been a 20% drop in tickets bought for the World Cup which is attributed to the popularity of and the interest in the World Cup. As the World Cup grabs the attention of most of the people, only hardcore tennis enthusiasts and maybe the people in London are gripped by the Wimbledon this year. Although both events are global sporting events, but the fact that the World Cup takes place once every four that the sheer scale of it is unmatchable by the smaller Wimbledon tournament has meant lesser viewers for Wimbledon this year.

Also read:

• Why a Winter Worldcup in Qatar Makes Sense
• Cost of FIFA Worldcup 2022
• Football Worldcup in Qatar and Cultural Issues

FIFA vs Wimbeldon