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The new power move. This is Optimal Living Daily Episode 2309 can we be the Authors of Our Lives without Suffering from Main Character Syndrome? By ira [email protected], and I'm Justin Oligar, very own personal narrator. Welcome to Optimal Living Daily Old for short.
This is where I read the best blogs to you, with permission from the authors covering productivity, minimalism, personal development, all that fun stuff. Now with that, let's get right to another post and start optimizing your life. Can we be the authors of Our Lives without Suffering from Main Character Syndrome? By ira Israel at iraisrael.com's our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization.
We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile. Goods are made to be used up and discarded. Reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images.
Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom. Christopher Lasch, from the Culture of American Life and Age of Diminishing Expectations it is an old joke that if someone attended Harvard, served in the Marines, or is vegan, you will know it within one minute of meeting him. Scott Galloway adds people who do crossfit to this list of braggarts. How do we determine if someone is a potential friend or foe when we first meet them?
Like many other animals, we need to discern if someone is a member of our tribe or not. The concept of tribal needs to be revisited under the ascendancy of late capitalism, social media, and globalization in a tribe usually consisting of around 140 or 150 related family members. Rarely would a member transgress the established laws or mores and risk being ejected into the wild to fend for herself. But since the Industrial Revolution, with many people living in cities away from their families under our system of highly competitive late capitalism, coupled with a gig economy of workers continuously seeking their next jobs Many people place a primacy on procuring potential clients or employers rather than establishing secure human connections.
Every social situation is viewed as networking. Relationships have become transactional. In Los Angeles, where I reside, I often witness people meet for the first time and do what I refer to as hovering, not dissimilar to dogs when they first meet to check if a person is friend or foe and then what potential role that person can play. In the mental screenplay entitled this Is what I Think My Life should resemble, I.e.
playmates plaything partner Next Source of Income since humans are so much more sophisticated than dogs sniffing each other, affinity grouping is how tribalism manifests visually. Two people see that they are wearing the same brand of clothing or shoes, have the same color credit cards, have similar coiffed hair or similar handbags or cars, and their lizard brains start to let down their cards. After visual cues, we use verbal language to determine commonalities. What's your name?
Where are you from? I love your jewelry. Can you believe the Dodgers lost yesterday? Did you see that bitcoin drop today?
What do you do for a living, etc. All of this verbal value is simply to determine if the other person is a trustworthy member of our tribe or if we should beware once safety is established. I've seen many people lunge into either a hard sell or a soft sell, and I think this is what Christopher Lasch so presciently predicted in the culture of narcissism. Much of the technology of the Internet that originally intended to bring people together has now been corrupted into exploiting the hedonic treadmill of consumer capitalism.
The tools needed to establish authentic rapport have been dulled from overstimulation and having too many choices. Just as an experiment, notice the percentage of emails and messages you received this week that mention some service or online course or new technology or travel experience or something that's going to end up making your wallet a few Duggets lighter. The questions that I always wonder where's the authenticity? Can people be authentic when they're selling something?
When I lived in Paris in the early 1990s, it was still vulgar to talk about work and money. It wasn't polite conversation, but the American Dream, American way has flooded the world with people who think they'll be happier if they own more stuff or better stuff or different stuff. More, better, different, but still just stuff. And once they own more stuff, then they have to tell more people about the stuff that they own.
In 1899, Thorson Veblen called it conspicuous consumption as you already know the primary thing that correlates strongly with happiness is the quality of our intimate relationships, more secure connections. After that comes autonomy and agency. Owning more stuff does not correlate strongly with happiness due to the fact that our minds are analogous to hedonic treadmills. Shortly after we sate any desire, it is replaced by another desire.
A few years before Thorpse and Devlin, Nietzsche prided his readers to live their lives as they were constructing works of art. Teenage solipsism and nihilism could be waylaid or at least remedied by creating creating beauty, adding beautiful creative expression to the world through music and literature and poetry and art and sculpture. But how can these artists and musicians and writers effectively market their arts today on the Internet without appearing to suffer from main character syndrome or what was previously referred to and sometimes diagnosed as narcissism? There used to be something called the art of conversation where through discussing art and music and literature, people found the members of their tribes.
After capitalism implodes and another modus operandi of human interaction emerges, will the next society look back on us as narcissists or as sociopaths? Or is the authors of our lives who just happen to cast ourselves as our own main characters? You've just listened to the post. Can we be the authors of our lives without suffering from main character syndrome?
By ira Israel of IraIsrael.com this episode is brought to you by Telus Online Security. Ugh, tax season is the worst. You mean hack season. Sorry, what?
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Right now it's just $199. And head to superpower.com and use code old at checkout for an additional $20 off your membership. Thank you, Ira. A lot of this is what the minimalist authors I narrate talk about conspicuous consumption, the hedonic treadmill that our secure and intimate connections are what truly bring happiness, not things.
And we know this. You it is so difficult to break away from the norm and not buy that shiny new object. And I get it. That's what this podcast is really for.
To help you and me both to at least make a more conscious decision about what we bring into our lives, whether objects or living things like people. Because even just second guessing, it can have a huge impact. If we take away that impulse by being slightly more mindful, we may just lead happier lives. So make that conscious decision today.
Hope you're having a great morning, afternoon or evening, whenever you're listening to this and I'll see you tomorrow where optimal life awaits.