What is the Harm of Superfluities?

Another draft -- I didn't realize it would automatically update the date to current.  Oh well!  This one's in reference  to Happy are you Poor

When you focus on the means, rather than the end, and get sidetracked into superfluities, what is the harm?

Father Dubay mentions that giving things away or up sounds bleak and negative. But once again, it's important to remember that by having things we are thereby losing other things. A list of the harms that can be done by indulgence.

1. The mind is dulled. It focuses on more trivial outside details and can't so easily perceive the reality behind the appearance or appetite.
2. A taste for prayer is lost.
3. Our neighbor does not have his needs met.
4. We lose a more stable happiness that is based on God rather than on us getting what we might happen to want or crave.
5. We gain a host of inner disturbances.

That last one rings with me. If I'm always concerning myself with what could possibly be, rather than what is, I invite infinity into my mind -- not the simple fullness of the presence of God, but something more like the little eerie lights in the swamp that lead the traveler away from the safe ground.