How restraint is a blessing

I got this awesome piece of text in my mailbox.. the author isn't mentioned, but I couldn't deprive you of it.

We pray to our Lord to lift the heaviness off our hearts: and no one can lift those burdens except He Alone. Nowadays , huge industries have been built up whose only function is to provide diversion and amusement for people. Indeed, most industry falls under this category: the product that sells is not simply the one that fulfills a need, but the one that diverts people from the awareness of their misery – thus, television , videos, sports cars, fashions, games, etc. etc. are the new necessities of life.

All of these products of diversion have to compete with each other to gain their portion of the market, thus, another huge industry: Advertising. So, as we drive through the streets, beautiful people with clean white smiles come to meet us from their billboards and testify that , if only we buy such – and – such a product, we will look as good as they do, and always be surrounded by other beautiful people. The same is true of television ads: all are happy and laughing people.

But he to who God has granted penetrating vision may observe that these people are smiling the ‘smile of the skeleton’, the smile which always appears on skulls: all is just show, inside of themselves they are empty. What people call pleasure is only a kind of forced enjoyment.

Very young people may perhaps really feel enjoyment, as everything new is tasteful, but as they continue on this way, more and more they feel boredom setting in, that pleasure becoming but a routine. As a result they go further and further on the same way, to see if they can outrace the shadow of routine that makes all pleasures tasteless. Though they cannot win this race, they keep on running, progressing towards extremes of stimulation, but still feeling no pleasure. This disappointment and the consequent misery result from the mistaken assumption that ‘more is better’. For example, a spoonful of honey is sweeter than a cupful which will only make you sick. But because the philosophy of endless greed is now the common creed, people think that finding a beehive would be their greatest fortune. How wrong they are!

Oh people who claim to possess understanding, you must understand that Your Lord has placed a hindrance before the fulfillment of some of your desires only for your own good, not because He enjoys depriving you of something good. If something is prohibited by religion it is only because that so-called pleasure is a trap to catch you into suffering