Re: Why am I so vulnerable to stress?

I know a teacher at the college I work at who visited Madagascar. He has travelled quite a bit and said that the areas he visited in Madagascar were the poorest he'd ever seen in all his life.

Their lives there are not simple... they have to work hard for the land they live on and for their food. The poorer areas deal mostly in trade and sometimes they simply just help one another.

However, at the same time their lives ARE simple in that they don't have all the distractions that money brings and all the stress that comes with it. Because they have no money and nothing to their name, they are free from things that trap us here in the United States. The U.S. was "built on freedom" but who truly is more free? Us with our Starbucks and banks and houses and cars? Or they who live and sleep on the soil, wake up with the sun, are bound to no one, and many who don't even have a set of clothes to wear and could hardly care that they are nude for everyone to see.

The instructor who went there said, yes, their life is hard, but they're happier than most people with riches - and in comparison, even the poorest people here in the states are rich.