grahamdbrown’s posterous

via blogs.guardian.co.uk

from Alain de Botton's "Status Anxiety"

When Franklin D Roosevelt was asked which book he could give to Nikolia Khruschev and the Soviets to exemplify the advantages of Western capitalist society he pointed bluntly to the Sears catalogue.

Such is the pinnacle of achievement of our civilization.

The paradox of progress is that a sharp decline in deprivation has created a sense of deprivation amongst ordinary folk. Now class and position no longer provide the security of non-achievement we are exposed to the reality that our "lot" is precisely our own doing. The country knave, the leather-worker, the serf and the weaver now awaken to the reality that their timeless existence is threatened by the idea that their neighbor and guild-brother now may be upgrading to an X5.

Lack of income, achievement and wealth are the flames that torture the average worker, fanned by the hidden hand of advertisers.

The flipside of meritocracy is status anxiety.

image from jdlejeune.com

based on Eckhart Tolle's "Living a Life of Inner Peace"

"Hell is the others" (Jean Paul Sartre)

"Us" and the "others", "Vegetarians and meat eaters", "Jews and Arabs", "Buddhists and non-Buddhists", "Locals and foreigners", "Believers and non-believers", "Patriots and terrorists".

As you grow you'll notice how preoccupied our minds are with conflict; finding what's good, what's wrong, what's too noisy or different.

You'll be surrounded by those who complain - complaining about the traffic jam because they need to feel "right". They need to feel morally superior to reality.

The need to complain is based on a fear of rejection. People will travel the world and complain about the places they go because they feel outside their comfort zone and in fear of rejection will reject their host first. We'll complain about the food, the weather, the traffic, the hotel or whatever we are able to reject.

This is the basis for conflict. We fear others we don't know and preempty rejection by first building a mental construct about these unknowns that skew our reality such that what we experience confirms our convictions.

We create signposts to enable us to deal with this rejection. I hide behind the veil of being "English" or "American" or "French" enabling me to in turn hide behind a collective set of beliefs, actions and securities that justify my rejection of others.

These convictions inevitably create our identity. Without conflict therefore, we feel our identity, our sense of "me" is threatened.

There is only one thing worse than the "egoic" me - the "egoic" us; criminals create less than 1% of all the suffering in the world - the rest is manufactured by normal citizens.

(Based on Matthieu Ricard's "Happiness")

There is an impostor in my head. I believe it's the core of my self, my entity. It gives me labels - I am English, I am an entrepreneur, I am a father etc.

This self-importance navigates my stream of consciousness - a boat that attracts attention and self-importance. It feeds on the next moment, future fantasies and past reminiscences.

I fear that without the boat, without these goals I cannot achieve yet these thoughts are the work of the impostor, giving me labels and signposts that dictate shortcuts on how my life should be - other people's agendas.

Imagine drifting downstream in the boat and you suddenly are awoken by crashing into another boat. Insensed, you rise to give both barrels to the clumsy navigator who just rammed your boat. Only, you don't - you find the other boat empty so you laugh at the stupidity. Now imagine the same scenario but with the other boat occupied - your reaction will be different. Your reaction is different because of the self-construct of "I". Our suffering in form of the negative energies and anger too were self-inflicted.

Without clinging to the boat, when the stream has object we have freedom.

Sometimes called the "happiest man in the world," Matthieu Ricard is a Buddhist monk, author and photographer.

To do no harm means to be awake. The basic qualities of knowing lie behind the mental construct and it is this construct that creates harm - negative emotions, illusion and attachment.

"You can't cheat the farm" says Covey.

You can learn a lot from the natural world. Nature provides us with a seemingly infinite repertoire of solutions to our human problems - from medicine to learning how to fly.

Yet, as humans we tend to believe we can short-cut the process. Rather than labour diligently in watering and nurturing our skills we'd prefer the shortcut.

When we think habit we often think of trying to kick smoking or a nervous tick. We rarely talk of habits outside of the pejorative. Yet, when you grow up there is one book I truly wished I had read earlier - Stephen Covey's "7 Habits of Highly Effective People".

I know a lot of people have tried to read it and have dismissed it. Why? Because it was too much work. You'll hear them talk about "The Secret" and other self-help silver bullets that involve improvement only at the superficial level.

Habits are your foundations. All you are is what you do on a regular basis. Habits are "uncool" because they require exercising the D-word - discipline - and when you talk to people of the D-word they visualize authoritarian teachers and parents.

Self-discipline is, however, freedom. As Aristotle said "Discipline is remembering what you want". See how those who lack discipline spend their lives unsure of what exactly it is they want out of any given scenario and constantly grasp at new ideas and "the next big thing".

Your strength of your ability to exercise and control your thoughts is the distance between your freedom and your lifetime bondage to blame, other people's agendas and opinions.

As Goethe said "things that matter most should never be at the mercy of the things that matter least". As you grow and get to know people in the professional domain see how many people's lives exist in the whirlwind; busy-busy, firefighting, always "bouncing" somewhere, dealing with some crisis, spinning plates and ultimately achieving nothing.

"The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing" as Covey says is the ultimate challenge - the truest test of our integrity. Maturity at this level releases us from the terror of deriving our security from the outside - from labels, from isms, from signposts and the opinions of others.

When we are able to exercise these 7 habits effectively we are liberated from a life of fire-fighting yet most people you meet will inevitably see the uphill effort required to conduct such interior work as too much effort and settle for the quick fix, the 60 minute synopsis, the success-in-a-box formula, or weekend course.

80/20 and Pareto will mean absolutely nothing to you, but what will resonate is that 95% of the people you meet spend their lives keeping themselves busy, keeping themselves insulated from the "main thing". They work harder, longer and experience far more stress than you but ultimately still spend their lives at the mercy of others.

The difference between you and them is your ability to exercise self-discipline and these habits.

Lastminute

You’ve got that dreamy look on your face.
You want to career down a mountainside

in a perspex ball: shake up the days,
dazzle the world with your escapades.

You wake up here, in a shabby career,
in a perspex ball, not travelling at all.

lastminute.com/site/help/about_us/about-us.html

You are not enough. I love this poem by copywriter Nick Astbury. Sums up the work in "Status Anxiety" by Alain de Botton and Tom Hodgkinson's "How to Be Free". These images are designed to make us feel inadequate and create a discomfort that convinces us that arrival and closure in the form of a cure is but one purchase away.

When you grow up you'll get a job and no doubt it'll make you dread waking up in the morning. I spent Summers working in building yards, factories and, worst of all, the horrors of a meat-paste processing plant.

During my mind-numbing existence I smoldered in resentment towards my "oppressors" - who were inevitably those who had been just like me, yet only 20 years earlier, but had stuck it out and worked their way up to line manager.

The irony of modern day wage slavery is that no one is "forced" into it. There are no modern day pirates ready to pressgang you into slavery. It's all in our head.

As you grow and are increasingly exposed to advertising, you will learn that it's repetitive message is a drip-drip-dripping that seduces you into believing you aren't "young/rich/popular/cool/handsome enough". As much as we castigate the hoodwinkery of the admen, we must also accept we too are complicit in these "mind forg'd manacles".

Ideology can only rule if, in the eyes of the masses, it rules without force. Coercion, therefore, is the key to acceptance. Ideology is embedded in textbooks, newspapers, TV, the internet and every other media that touches you on a daily basis meekly implying it only states "age old truths".

Notice how those whose world-view fails to accept the dominant ideology and how they are treated, excoriated and even demonized by the media; hippies, the unwashed, tree-huggers, tramps, heretics, wanderers, vagabonds, squatters, loners, ravers and freaks.

Those brave enough to stand up for change and for the individual were inevitably alienated and ridiculed by ideology; the stories of Martin Luther King, Siddartha Gautama (The Buddha), Gandhi, John Lennon and even Jesus Christ are stories of outsiders brave enough to recognize ideology is not immutable.

Just because no-one is physically forced to accept an idea doesn't mean it's persuasive might is any less tangible.

The naivety of youth persuades us that force is the road to resistance. Yet, wisdom teaches us that resistance is best exercised through choice. Just as Winston exercises his choice to enjoy the moment, enjoy nature in the ending sequence of George Orwell's 1984 we too have the ability to choose our own reality.

When you were younger you had what Alan Watts would call "The Oceanic Experience". As a baby, you weren't able to distinguish between the "you" and your surroundings. The experience and the experiencer were one.

And now a world of education lies before you. As much as it can give it can also take; everything from the nature of a rock, to the colour of a star will be given a label.

As a baby labels were unnecessary. You experienced without signposts. Yet, as you grow education trains us to cling to them. The fragile ego absorbs them. "I'm Chinese", "I'm a Manchester United supported", "I'm a marketing manager", "I'm a hairdresser", "I'm Buddhist", "I'm vegetarian" or "I'm a Republican".

Every label is a move away from openness because each not only defines how we ought to behave but also how you wish others to interact with you.

"What are you?" you'll be asked. Are you English? Are you vegetarian or what? Are you Buddhist or Christian? Because they'll need to get closure on the discomfort caused by someone who doesn't fit into a rigid worldview.

The fragile ego needs labels to hide its fragility. As you grow, as you pass through school you'll see this play out and feel the urge to hide behind these labels. Yet, never forget that security is the opposite of freedom and the ability to live without labels is the mark of a confident man.

Why do we envy and suffer in a world of plenty?

There's a section in Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety that reminds me of the infamous Fight Club quote:

God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables — slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

In De Botton's text, he quotes Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

"However independent minded we might judge ourselves to be we are in fact dangerously poor at understanding our own needs."

"Our souls rarely articulate what they must have in order to be satisfied. Or, when the do mumble something their commands are likely to be contradictory. "

Rousseau invited us to think of our minds as susceptible to the external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied. Voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and can distract us from the careful arduous task of correctly tracing our priorities.