From the Me Generation to Re Generation
By Phil Golding
In an article called “Belief Beyond Self” in the previous edition of Uneek Magazine, by Trevor Chamber, the consequences of promoting “Self-esteem and feeling good” was delved into. As he, and many researches, even those who initially trumpeted this new approach to psychology, have discovered, maximising your self-esteem and your expectations of thinking that you should always feel good, has actually led to a rise in rates of depression and other undesirable social effects such as rising aggression and crime. Trevor's article pointed out that a more selfish, me centered, approach to life has taken over because of this, which has reduced our meaning of life from larger, more service orientated goals such a serving country and being a good citizen, to mere self indulgence.
So what is the answer here? Is raising our self-esteem really a bad thing? Clearly, the work that I do as a counsellor and psychotherapist indicates that it isn't a bad thing. In fact, self-esteem is essential to psychological wellbeing. There is obviously a trap to this approach to wellbeing, however, and we need to look more closely at the nature of this trap before we can see our way around it and therefore find a way to regenerate the me generation.
There was a new age self-help movie being promoted a year or two ago called “The Secret”. Its focus was the power of consciously creating and therefore having what you want. Although I liked and agreed with certain aspects of its message, this movie at the same time left me feeling uncomfortable. The uncomfortable feeling was triggered by The Secret's emphasis on materialism and consumerism, such as having, through our own positive thinking, a diamond necklace, a sporty car or a huge mansion, which were featured in the movie.
Trevor's article linked the rise in depression with a self-centred form of maximizing self-esteem. I am suggesting there is an additional driving force behind this social degradation and that is the advent of consumerism as a way of life. According to Amitabh Shukla in his tweet article “The Effects of Consumerism”,
“The economy is judged by the production and selling of goods... The more goods produced and consumed by society, the higher the growth rate of the economy. The prosperity of a nation is judged by the per capita income of individuals residing in it. The economy is considered to be” doing well” if the purchasing power of the people is high. In ( a ) consumer society, people replace their goods with newer ones. They purchase goods, use them and throw them away.”
Why is consumerism a social problem? As Neal Lawson points out in an article for the Guardian in the UK, “t urbo-consumerism is the driving force behind crime ,
So if you want the causes of crime then look no further than the impulse of the poor to belong and be normal. So strong is this urge that the failed consumer will lie, cheat and steal to "earn" the trappings of success. In the world of the "me generation", people become calculating rather than law-abiding in their overwhelming desire to be normal. This is crime driven by the rampant egoism of turbo-consumerism, where enough is never enough.”
It is not that our modern society has invented consumerism. It has always been there in every established culture in many different forms. The difference is to the degree our whole society has been incorporated into it. To be not just successful, but normal, in our society is to be a successful consumer. You don't have to be poor to be trapped in this never ending need. It is not enough to be just materially comfortable. You have to have a life-style that is way beyond that, and forever updating your gadgetry to the next, more advanced model, whether you really need it or not. This consumerist way of life has become all consuming. It pervades every aspect of our life. We are hooked into it even when we think we are not.
I remember as a child being inspired by the predictions of the computer age. It was said that computers were going to save us so much time and money that our lives would be full of leisure and abundance. Some of us have plenty of abundance, but few of us have much leisure. Instead, all we have done with this marvellous technology is turbo-charged the rat-race.
So here is the trap. Through our good parenting, we instill in our children the belief that they deserve everything that they want. We tell them they are worth it. We may talk about self-worth in terms of love, but this is buried underneath the overflow of the consumer driven vision of material achievement. Our self-worth becomes based on something external and this is reinforced wherever we turn. Our whole education system is geared to preparing us to get out there and compete in the never ending rat-race of consumerism, and compete we do. To compete we have to be smart. No, we have to be smarter, but then that guy over there just got even smarter still? Oh no, will little Johnny or little Mary make it? Mean while, little Johnny and little Mary are buckling under the pressure. Even if they can cut it, something in them just does not feel right. Something in them is dying. Something in them is getting very disillusioned and very angry.
The importance of building self-esteem has been high-jacked by consumerism. Deep down, we all know that consumerism is unsustainable, no matter which way we look at it, whether it is social, environmental or financial. We are either still trying to be successful/normal in this relentless rat-race, or we just don't know how to get off the rat-race, even when we fail to succeed and are cast aside into the welfare net. We still have our self-worth, our identity, well and truly hooked into this ravenous god called consumerism.
So the me generation has got itself cornered in its own self-created trap of consumerism and is getting consumed in the process. The bottom line here is; emotional fulfilment cannot be satisfied by a material thing. That is why enough is never enough. We have created a social addiction and we have become consumer junkies.
So how do we get untrapped? The answer is in the fact that the trap is self-created. If we have created it, then we can uncreate it, or at the very least, ourselves as individuals can unhook from this ravenous god and hook ourselves into something that is truly sustainable. From there we can show the way to the rest of society. We can create a sustainable future where there is leisure and abundance. The way we can do this is to come back around the way we came and that is looking at how we are developing our self-esteem. Trevor, in his article, hit the nail on the head when he wrote:
“Empowerment in life comes from finding firmer, larger and healthier foundations beyond our own isolated, fragile self .”
But this opens up another dilemma. How do we get to, or create these foundations beyond our own isolated, fragile self? This is a question that has been plaguing humanity all through history. In recent history we have tried serving God, or at least the god we were told to serve, but this has not set us free. We tried serving our country but ran headlong into the human frailty of politics and dishonest politicians. We have rebelled against conservatism and dropped out into the drug scene and free love, but that got boring and too much of a health hazard. And here we are trying to make consumerism work, even though we know it won't. So where do we go from here?
Over the last century and a half, for a significant number of people, this search for a sustainable higher meaning has lead to them finding what they were looking for. I count myself to be amongst this group of people, although I certainly didn't start out that way. My search was driven by my own chronic depression and a feeling of being marginalized from the fruits of mainstream society.
My searching caused me to stumble upon a self-help program that led me to a very effective philosophical approach to life, which I discovered has been around in one form or another for as long as history itself. The core of that approach is:
Unconditional Love and Total Personal Responsibility.
These are two very fundamental principles. It took me a while to boil it all down to these two principles, but once I did, I could see that these two core principles are the active elements in any process of living that is truly successful in creating peace, harmony, goodwill, cooperation, fulfilment and abundance. I have not encountered any exception to this rule.
The trick is in how to integrate these fundamental principles into our own lives. How can we live them in a very practical and effective way? In terms of self-esteem, these two principles combine together like yin and yang in the form of accepting total personal responsibility to love ourselves unconditionally . Aren't we just falling into self-indulgence here again? The answer is no, because that commitment to total personal responsibility keeps bringing us back to being our own internal source of love. We are not looking to other people, places or things to fill us up. We have set in stone a commitment to fill ourselves up from the inside. How is this possible? How can we fill ourselves up without taking from anything or anyone else? This is a big perceptual block that so many of us encounter.
To solve this riddle, we must re-examine the way we look at love. The common mistake we make is in thinking that we can get a sustainable love from another person, place or thing. Let's drop the places and things. We have already worked out that we can't really get fulfilment from this. What about getting love from someone else? That means that someone else owns our love. Think about this. Once again we are pinned to something external. Who gave them our love? In that case, we must own the love that belongs to some one else. Where did we get it from? What do we really know about someone else's requirements of love and fulfilment? Do we even know what our own requirements are? If we are really honest with ourselves, we end up concluding that our awareness of this is vague at best. And yet human beings do love, and with great power.
Where I am getting to here is that we don't really know about love with any real clarity of awareness until we can truly love ourselves. I am talking here about loving ourselves unconditionally, which means being able to face and accept and work with everything about ourselves, even the parts of ourselves that we would rather hide away from the rest of society. The pressure to perform, to measure up has become so great in our society that our socially conditioned minds are stuffed full of self-condemnation about all the little and big ways we did not measure up, which also means we blame others for not measuring up, which is really the same thing. We have an inner-tyrant constantly whipping us for our so-called failings. You don't think so? Try this personal experiment and see what you find. Today, right this moment, make a rock solid commitment to treat yourself and speak to yourself only with loving kindness, compassion, forgiveness and acceptance. Do this for others as well, when you catch yourself blaming. While doing this, it is essential to take total personal responsibility for all that you feel, think, say and do. This is not about selfish self-indulgence. What it is about is being the wise, loving parent to your fragile, vulnerable, confused and often frighted human-self.
Keep a little note book in your pocked or your handbag and jot down every time you put yourself or someone else down. When you catch yourself, imagine this human-self that you are putting down is a vulnerable child just trying to grow up. Do your best to find a way to mentor and care for yourself in that moment in a kind and constructive way.
Be prepared to be shocked at what you discover. Be prepared to discover how unskilled you are at being your own wise, loving parent. That's okay. Accept that too and just keep learning about yourself through this process and keep trying your best to love yourself unconditionally. After all, this is what unconditional love does. Concentrate on loving yourself and let everyone else just be themselves.
When doing this experiment, you may get quick positive results. You may also run into confusion and pain, however. Don't be discouraged by this, as hard it may seem. What I suggest is happening is that you are running hard up against your self-condemnation programs and they are too strong for you to as yet get a sense of how to love yourself and actually feel the benefits of this. The benefits will come if you don't give up, but you may need to reach out for help from a good counsellor to get you over that hump.
What we discover when we sincerely practice this process is the power of love that everyone has in them. It is like a life force that everyone can tap into. What also happens is that we start to let go of all this external validation. We no longer need it. We are already full of what we are looking for. We don't need so many things. We don't need to put so much pressure on other people. Most of all, we feel relaxed and secure. Another strange thing starts to happen as well. We get this mysterious growing feeling that we are somehow one with everything around us. Our whole way of looking at and approaching life begins to change. We gain a sense of harmony with life and are actually able to be a creator of that harmony. We feel regenerated. Rat-race? What rat-race?
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• i. Trevor Chambers, Uneek Magazine, ???, “ Empowerment in life comes from finding firmer, larger and healthier foundations beyond our own isolated, fragile self. Belief beyond Self-Belief” .
• ii. Posted by Amitabh Shukla on July 2, 2009 in World Economy . “ The Effects of Consumerism ” . http://www.paggu.com/business/world-economy/the-effects-of-consumerism/ .
• iii. Neal Lawson , The Guardian, Thursday 29 June 2006 . “ Turbo-consumerism is the driving force behind crime” .
• iv. The Secret , [DVD] (2006). Prime Time Productions. Melbourne, Australia.