Hello and welcome back!
If you haven’t done so, please go and read Part One of this series.
Today we are going to be diving deeper into how we are all so deeply set up to be in a state of perpetual fear around not having enough, not doing enough and not being enough - and how THIS is impacting our capacity to determine what true abundance is, what is overabundance and where the lines of harm are.
We are going to be looking at why more is not always better - and in many cases it is the reason we are suffering - but that we don’t see that because our sense of personal security is too deeply wrapped up in what we produce and consume and the ways we are being indoctrinated to believe that enough is never actually enough.
The ways we are being taught that WE can never be enough and thus we can never be safe - and that the only solution to this is to keep playing the game.
Let’s dive in and see how we go!
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We Are Being Indoctrinated Into What To Care About
The only way for those at the top to continue to increase their profit margins is to increase the amount they are selling by either to expand their customer base or to increase the amount of product their customers are buying or to decrease cost of production - and both of these things have a negative impact on society at large.
In order to increase profit margins via increased consumption, a lot of the time things are sold to us as though they are a necessity when in reality they are a luxury or something we can easily take or leave. MOST things that are sold to us are not sold to us based on their utility, durability or quality - rather they are sold to us based on the IMAGE they will produce of our character, worth and value when we own them. We are taught that certain clothing labels make us look better than others. Certain hair styles. Certain cars. We are literally being sold that we can find our identity, we can find our social connection and we can find our sense of social collateral via the things we own - and therefore we are then willing to pay more and more and more for these goods and services in order to garner that social benefit.
We are also sold things that are intentionally manufactured to break down, go out of style, fall apart and be unusable in some way quickly - so that we are incentivised to continue buying more and more more and more because, of course! This is how it’s set up!
Not to mention again, that the pain we feel in our society that is actually DUE to the system itself, is being obfuscated as being caused by a lack or flaw in us - if you don’t have enough money, it’s because you’re not working hard enough. If you are getting burnt out it’s because you aren’t strong enough. If you have depression or anxiety you need to fix yourself so you can keep going and living normally. The solution is always that we are SOLD something to fix OURSELVES (more of the system profiting), rather than us ever being able to take a step back and consider that it may be that we are RESPONDING to a system that is painful, and it is actually the SYSTEM that needs to change.
The self help/self improvement industry is as big as it is, in part because we are taught that ALL THINGS in life are due to OUR CHOICES and that we can perfect our lives via perfecting ourselves - instead of ever looking at the causative factors of the very systems we live in, and whether or not those systems actually facilitate health. This again means that we are just going to produce and consume more as the ‘solution’ to every problem we have - instead of realizing that it’s the over consumption and production THEMSELVES that are CAUSING the problem a lot of the time.
This is why there are constantly changing trends in everything - from our clothing, to our music, to our food - nothing stays ‘in style’ for that long and everything that comes into style is sold to us based on what it MEANS about us.
Take the diet industry as just one example.
First things first - right now it is ‘trendy’ to be thin/lean/muscular. We don’t want peg thin because that’s been done, and we don’t want curvy or anything remotely ‘natural’ because that would be too easily achieved by too many people.
Rather what’s viewed as desirable right now is a body that requires exceptional amounts of time, energy and money.
What is viewed as good enough right now is a body that requires that we have good foundational genetics, that we have access to the time and resources to work out in a very specific way, that we have access to certain foods in the correct quantities in order to build muscle without gaining fat, and that we have the capacity to keep this up for sustained periods of time - long enough to create a shift to our overall body composition.
This physique requires adequate time to rest, it requires recovery treatment, often specialized clothing to enhance what’s there - and all of this depends on us having ample free time to devote to our bodies and ample income to devote to our bodies.
The body type that is being sold to us as desirable is absolutely not accessible by everyone - it is an elite thing.
But that isn’t how it’s marketed.
Rather, the way this desirable body is sold to us is via the idea that to have this body means that you are healthy. And in our society ‘healthy’ is code for making all the right choices, being self responsible, being intelligent, being worthy of love and respect and being a person that we should look up to and idolize.
Looking how we are supposed to look is about SO MUCH MORE than just ‘taking care of ourselves’ - it’s about showing the world that you are ‘doing things right’ - that again you are responsible, that you are self reliant, that you are intelligent, that you are worthy of safety, love and respect.
Because in our society it is still fully socially acceptable to look at people who DON’T fit into our current standards of ‘health’ via how they APPEAR on the outside, and to assume that they are lazy, weak, not trying hard enough. That they are somehow ‘less than’ and that they are then worthy of being treated with less than common decency.
To exist in a body that doesn’t fit into cultural standards of beauty is to be shamed, blamed, judged, criticized - and worse - to be literally held back from opportunities and the ability to move up in the world because it is still acceptable to judge someone's competence based on their body shape and size.
The reality is, you can tell nothing about someone's intelligence, sense of motivation, capacity to care for themselves and ability based on how they look.
The reality is that having time and energy and money enough to go to the gym, to be meticulous with your diet, to keep up with fashion trends and to make yourself ‘look the part’ of a healthy individual doesn’t actually require that you have any more worth or value as a human being than anyone who doesn’t - but our culture says that it does.
And we don’t even SEE that this is what’s happening.
People's lives are made safe and unsafe, people are either accepted or rejected, people are given opportunities or held out based purely on how well they are able to fit into cultural standards of beauty - that we are being indoctrinated to believe are cultural standards of ‘health’ and that we are being trained to believe have some connection to someones worth and value.
And it’s EXPENSIVE to be in this physical shape - that is the whole design behind it.
What these body types REALLY represent is WEALTH - plain and simple.
These bodies are purchased.
And again, in order to feel SAFE in society, we have to LOOK the part of someone who is acceptable - otherwise again we risk not having connection, opportunity and a chance to be safe.
You see how this works?
Then add to that the ‘ideal body’ constantly CHANGING - requiring new things like lip fillers and pounds of skin care, then botox, then new clothes then a new diet and new health food products - all of it changing going round and round trending then falling out of trend.
Are you taking care of your gut health with all of these supplements? Are you on trend with being a vegan or a carnivore or a marathon runner, no, doing pilates? Are you keeping up with the latest research on brain health and all the things you need to eat and do and take in order to have that?
You see the pattern here?
Ideal body = having the access to the new and trending thing + having access to the time and money to tend to your body in a likely obsessive way + having the ability to adapt to all the changes at a moments notice + being able to flaunt your participation in all of this so that you can be seen as worthy of safety, opportunity and connection.
It’s not about being healthy.
It’s about being wealthy so you can be perceived as good enough.
So that you can be perceived as worthy.
We are literally being taught WHO to value based on what they HAVE and what they DO - based on what they can afford to invest their time, money and energy in, and thereby what they are doing for a living that grants them the capacity to invest in those things.
If we really look deeply, we will see that in order to look the part of ‘healthy’, you have to be in a pretty much CONSTANT state of consumption - food, workouts, social media to be up on trends, face/body/hair/nail treatments, clothing - you get the idea.
Now when we consider that this is just ONE aspect of what we are taught we must be caring about - this doesn’t even touch all the other things we have to be doing/investing in/consuming in order to be keeping up with things and therefore feeling like we belong - with the ever evolving trends of what’s popular in music, in art, in television, what’s popular in methods of transport, holidays, technology to own, accessories to have, what's popular in terms of how we speak, how we carry ourselves, if we are going to therapy or not, what’s popular in spirituality - everything shifts, everything changes and all of it requires more STUFF to keep up with.
Not to mention the fact that pretty much all of what we consume - from our clothing to our technology to our methods of transport to our media and everything in between - is made to either fall apart or go out of style thus creating a situation where we are perpetually having to buy new items - you can see how this ‘never enough’ culture is driving us into a state of over consumption that we again, rarely even see.
Why?
Again, this is all for the purpose of those ever increasing profit margins. Increasing demand by creating ever evolving trends and products that are meant to go out of style and fall apart.
It’s All Built To Fall Apart/Not Work So We Have To Keep Re-Investing
There is also the fact that so much of what we consume is produced in ways where those who are doing the labor of production are being asked to exchange their time and energy for FAR less than what they are actually WORTH in terms of what they contribute to the line of command.
We live in a system where it’s been fully and completely normalized for those who grow and transport our food, those who work the cash register at the stores we frequent, those who manage and delegate operations, those who work in the factories putting our goods and services together, those who sustain and maintain our infrastructure and those who teach our children and treat our wounds are being paid less than a living wage for their time.
A system where we have been trained to see these people as ‘low skill’ workers who don’t deserve to have healthcare, don’t deserve to have a quality of life outside of work, who don’t deserve to be treated with the same level of care and respect as our lawyers, doctors, C.E.O’s and heads of companies. A system that tells us that people who can’t afford to go to university or those who don’t have access to ‘higher level’ positions in our society are simply less than, lazy, living in a tough situation purely because of their own bad choices and are therefore undeserving of a basic level of life satisfaction.
We are again trained to believe that fixing ourselves is ALWAYS the solution - and this means there is no end to the amount of things someone can SELL to ‘fix you’ and the number of things we can BUY to ‘fix ourselves’ - because fixing ourselves isn’t the answer. But so long as we don’t see that - the system continues to benefit from our pain by selling us things that will never work, keeping us believing that they didn’t work because WE did it wrong/need the next thing - and round and round it goes - you see the pattern here?
A system that has fully indoctrinated us into believing that the selfish greed of those who run our industries cutting corners in terms of providing for their workers, blocking them from unionizing, creating hostile working environments and threats of having no job at all is justified and somehow ‘how things should be.’
A system that tells us that those who grow up in neighborhoods with poor access to education, food, resources, safe places to be outside and connection to the world where they COULD move up are criminals, lazy, broken, bad, scary people to be feared at best and who are meant to be a cautionary tale at worse - keeping those in the middle of our system ‘in line’ lest you become ‘like them.’
We are trained to see people as disposable based on what they DO in the system.
This creates a situation where those at the bottom are often FORCED into a lifestyle of over production because they HAVE to work more than one job, because they have to fight hard to put themselves through school without support, where they are stuck in loops of poverty because the barrier to entry for saving money requires that you already HAVE money (for instance, being able to buy in bulk as a way of saving on cost by having the money up front to invest, being able to pay for school, being able to purchase high quality things that aren’t going to break and need to be replaced often etc) and this is seen as normal and deserved.
It also creates a situation where those in the middle, those who DO have enough are constantly feeling the threat of ‘falling behind’ and thus feeling pressured to constantly be ‘leveling up’ because heaven forbid we all do just ENOUGH work and then STOP allowing ourselves to be exploited by doing more, offering more, creating more, selling more and doing more - thus creating less demand and less supply.
We are being pushed into a state of continual burnout either by necessity because our systems are so unfair or because we have been taught that to stagnate, not to grow, not to keep up and not to be ever in a state of striving to become richer/more successful/more luxurious/more abundant is akin to sin.
Again, all so that those at the top can continue to earn more while paying less for the production of what it is they oversee the production of.
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Alright, let’s take one more break here and come back next week to wrap this series up!
<3
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Then come check out the Mystery School.
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