![\"thich-nhat-hanh-copy\"](\"https:\/\/themindunleashed.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/Thich-Nhat-Hanh-copy.jpg\")
<\/p>\nNobel Peace Prize nominee and Zen Buddhist master, Thich Nhat Hanh has a very different theory about why our ecosystems are dying and our financial systems are crumbling. The Vietnamese monk credited with bringing mindfulness to the West believes that our desperation to succeed at all costs fuels our voracious economic system. An innumerable number of worldly \u2018sicknesses\u2019 come from this singular philosophical vice.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
On one of Hanh\u2019s Facebook posts<\/a> he said, \u201cEach one of us has to ask ourselves, What do I really want? Do I really want to be Number One? Or do I want to be happy? If you want success, you may sacrifice your happiness for it. You can become a victim of success, but you can never become a victim of happiness.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Thay \u2013 as his followers call him, is no stranger to the ideology of the movers and shakers in our world economy. He was invited to speak in Silicon Valley by Steve Jobs once, and has met with the World Bank president Jim Yong Kim<\/a>. \u00a0He has also met with senior Google engineers to discuss how they could develop technologies which could be more compassionate and bring about positive change, instead of increasing people\u2019s stress and isolation, taking them away from nature, and one another.<\/p>\n He recently explained his concern with how people pin their happiness on success in an interview with the Guardian<\/a>.<\/p>\n “If you know how to practice mindfulness you can generate peace and joy right here, right now. And you’ll appreciate that and it will change you. In the beginning, you believe that if you cannot become number one, you cannot be happy, but if you practice mindfulness you will readily release that kind of idea. We need not fear that mindfulness might become only a means and not an end because in mindfulness the means and the end are the same thing. There is no way to happiness; happiness is the way.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Thay warns, however, that practicing mindfulness just to be more productive at work, or only to enjoy more material success will leave the practitioner with a pale shadow of awareness compared to what true<\/em> mindfulness can provide. He suggests<\/a>,<\/p><\/div>