Licking the Earth

"...The pleasure-centered person, too soon bored with each succeeding level of 'fun', constantly cries for more and more. So the next new pleasure has to be bigger and better, more exciting, with a bigger 'high'. A person on this state becomes almost entirely narcissistic, interpreting all of life in terms of the pleasure it proves to the self here and now. Too many vacations that last too long, too many movies, too much TC, too much video game playing –too much undisciplined leisure time in which a person continually takes the course of least resistance gradually wastes a life. It ensures that a person’s capacities stay dormant, that talents remain undeveloped, that the mind and spirit become lethargic and that the heart is unfulfilled... Malcolm Muggeridge writes 'A Twentieth-Century Testimony': When I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems now most futile and absurd. For instance, success in all of its various guises; being known and being praised; ostensible pleasures, like acquiring money or seducing women, or travelling, going to and fro in the world and up and down in it like Satan, explaining and experiencing whatever Vanity Fair has to offer. In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, 'licking the earth'." (Stephen R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, 115)

While reading Covey's quote, I had to wonder in what or whom do I place my trust to fulfill my deepest desires?