The era of our discontent

I like to listen to the Hidden Brain podcast while I'm cleaning stalls in the morning. Today I began an episode about why it is so difficult for us to be thankful. I'm only in the very beginning of it, so I'll finish it tomorrow, but I have a lot of thoughts which I'll try to share tomorrow. I am also in the middle of reading The Perfection Trap: Embracing the Power of Good Enough by Thomas Curran. The portion I read today has I lot to say about the question of why thankfulness is difficult, so I'll start with this today.

"The Power of advertising is so enormous that even the most informed people have a hard time resisting vociferous and aggressive social persuasion that's working against them around the clock. ...

The totality is why a great majority of us struggle with self-acceptance. It's the reason we can never feel like we're ever enough. Because as long as contentment is kept tantalizingly from our reach, we're putty in the advertiser's hands, and guided by them we'll keep craving and consuming and craving and consuming in the hopeless quest for perfection in our lives and lifestyles.

And this is where the issues broaden out. In the growth-is-everything economy, discontentment must forever be engineered into our lives. There's simply no alternative. It sounds perverse, but if we want to have the things we need, we're going to have to keep buying the things we don't. Health care, security, education, jobs -- these necessities of life now depend on our continuing to trade present happiness for the promise of something more. Because if we were just allowed to breath for a moment, step outside the hologram and discover contentment in the miracle that is our mere existence, then we'd stop craving. And if we stop craving, we'd stop consuming. Businesses would then have to close, jobs would be lost, the things we need would begin to disappear, and the foundations of society as we know it would collapse. 

Popular self-help books, documentaries, TV shows, TED Talks, and wellness websites overflow with tips, tricks, and life hacks for how to overcome the all-pervasive feeling of never enough. But the illusion of agency makes me wonder: do we truly understand how completely and utterly built-in that feeling is? Not rich enough, not cool enough, not attractive enough, not productive enough -- these aren't bothersome tics that can be flicked away with a bit of self-care or positive thinking. They're systemic thoughts, or what cognitive historians call 'root metaphors,' which have penetrated so deeply into our interiors that we truly believe not feeling enough, or needing to constantly update and improve ourselves are conditions of human nature.

The very fabric of modern society is woven from our discontent. Magnifying the many imperfections that advertisers have manufactures into existence is how we're kept in an always expanding state of super-charged consumption, and how, by extension, our economy is kept in an always expanding state of supercharged growth. ....

Our dilemma, in many ways, is more acute. We're still bombarded with messaging about what we should have and who we should be. But these days cheap imports and a bonanza in consumer credit mean a great majority of us can buy the things we're told we need. We don't lack, certainly not in comparison to older generations. If anything, we have access to too much stuff -- more than we could ever need. ...

With these material wants, and now the finance to satisfy them, you'd think we'd be happier.  ...it's not quite that simple. American economist Richard Easterlin's classic research on the impact of wealth on people's well-being is clear in its conclusions: more money and stuff does not equal more happiness. His analyses consistently reveal that once a country reaches a certain threshold of affluence, additional affluence is not matched by gains in people's well-being.  ...

Growing up, consumer culture, and spectacle of other people's consumption, taught me to be ashamed of every aspect of my life that didn't match up -- which was just about all of them. And I'm not alone in having that deficit thinking drilled into me. 'Every single person I've interviewed,' says influential professor Brené Brown, 'spoke about struggling with vulnerablility' and 'shame-based fears' of not being enough. All of my students speak of exactly the same struggle. As do a great majority of my family and friends. Shame is the reason we're seeing those surging levels of socially prescribed perfectionism. 'I'm not perfect enough' and 'everyone expects me to be perfect': that's the inner dialogue of a new generation molded in the image of supply-side economics." (pp. 117-119; 124-125)

There's a lot there to think about, huh? Probably the very short version of all of that is advertising is pernicious and creates a culture a never enough all as a sacrifice to the great god of profit and wealth. 

In college I was assigned the book, Advertising the American Dream by Roland Marchand. I didn't keep very many books from college, but I kept this one. It was one of those life changing books in that it opened my eyes to what advertising is and its history. (I highly recommend it if you are interested in the topic.) Other than a brief propaganda unit in seventh grade, I hadn't thought very much about the messages I consumed on a daily basis. This book changed that. While being aware doesn't always make you immune, it can create a bit of awareness to give you a leg up in combating it. As a young wife and mother, I was very much prone to focusing on what I didn't have... often centering on other people's larger houses. That was the season I banned catalogs from our house because I realized they were just feeding my discontent. Discontent though I lived in a lovely (if small) Victorian house that was actually perfect for us at that point in our lives. Even now I try very hard to limit the advertising I see. Not watching television and very little streaming does help a lot in missing out on commercials. (When I do have to sit through them... good gravy they're horrible!) 

So your assignment? Think carefully about the advertising its messaging that you consume without really even being aware of it. This is also my children's year long assignment... keeping a notebook where they note the advertising they come across and then labeling what marketing propaganda technique is being used. It's probably not a bad thing for all of us to do. Awareness really is the first step.