Material advancement cannot make you happy. It may be for a few days, somebody, some . . . if somebody is very poor, and if he all of a sudden gets millions of dollars, he may feel happy, "Now I have got so much money." But that happiness is not ultimate. That is temporary happiness. There will be a reaction.
After he has enjoyed fully that millions of dollars, he will again feel unhappy, frustration, confusion. That is the nature, because the spirit soul’s happiness is different happiness. The defect of the modern civilization is that they do not see this, what is the defect, that in spite of so much material advancement, why a section of people is not happy, why they are seeking happiness somewhere else?
So this is the defect of modern education: they do not see it. But the answer is there in the Bhagavad-gītā. The answer is there. Unfortunately, we do not read all this literature. The answer is there. Lord Kṛṣṇa says, sukham ātyantikaṁ yat tad atīndriyam-grāhyam (BG 6.21).
The real happiness . . . happiness means sense gratification. Happiness, the other import of happiness, is sense gratification. So we are also trying to be happy by sense gratification in the material world. But because we are spirit soul, our adjustment of this material happiness will not make us happy, because our nature is different.
For example, that if I build a very palatial building in some lonely island in the sea, and I give you to live there—just like sometimes the lighthouse is there, they are living, but they are not happy. They are not happy. Just like there is a poetry, Alexander Selkirk. Perhaps you might have read? In our childhood we read this, that Robinson Crusoe, he was thrown into an isolated island. So enough land, enough material resources, everything.
He says: "I am the monarch of all I survey." So he was thinking that "Now I am the monarch; there is no other human being. So I am the monarch." But still he was feeling . . . "Society, friendship and love divinely bestowed upon man. Had I the wings of a dove, I could go again to my home." Why? Because ānanda-mayo 'bhyāsāt (Vedānta-sūtra 1.1.12).
The spirit soul wants happiness in a different way, in society, in friendship and love. This is the real thing.
So the Māyāvādī philosophers, they being failure to find society, friendship, and love in the material world, they are frustrated. They are seeking void—make it all minus, zero. You see? But that is also not the real happiness. Because naturally I am seeking society, friendship and love, but this society, friendship and love has not given me that happiness. So making it zero, or void, is not the ultimate solution. Just like you have got some disease in your eyes.