once we began to chime the hour, we lost the ability to be satisfied - Mitch Albom

We've got a sort of brainwashing going on in our country, Morrie sighed. Do you know how they brainwash people? They repeat something over and over. And that's what we do in this country. Owning things is good. More money is good. More property is good. More commercialism is good. More is good. More is good. We repeat it — and have it repeated to us — over and over until nobody bothers to even think otherwise. The average person is so fogged up by all of this, he has no perspective on what's really important anymore.

Wherever I went in my life, I met people wanting to gobble up something new. Gobble up a new car. Gobble up a new piece of property. Gobble up the latest toy. And then they wanted to tell you about it. 'Guess what I got? Guess what I got?'

You know how I interpreted that? These were people so hungry for love that they were accepting substitutes. They were embracing material things and expecting a sort of hug back. But it never works. You can't substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship.

Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness. I can tell you, as I'm sitting here dying, when you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you're looking for, no matter how much of them you have.

"It is too late."

The old man shook his head. "It is never too late or too soon. It is when it is supposed to be."

He smiled. "There is a plan, Dor."

Dor came from a time before the written word, a time
when if you wished to speak with someone, you walked to see them. This time was different. The tools of
this era — phones, computers — enabled people to move at a blurring pace. Yet despite all they
accomplished, they were never at peace. They constantly checked their devices to see what time it was — the very thing Dor had tried to determine once with a stick, a stone, and a shadow.