{"id":153247,"date":"2020-02-10T12:00:56","date_gmt":"2020-02-10T12:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=153247"},"modified":"2020-02-06T08:42:20","modified_gmt":"2020-02-06T08:42:20","slug":"the-american-life-is-killing-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/02\/the-american-life-is-killing-you\/","title":{"rendered":"The American Life Is Killing You"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI believe we are a species with amnesia, I think we have forgotten our roots and our origins. I think we are quite lost in many ways. And we live in a society that invests huge amounts of money and vast quantities of energy in ensuring that we all stay lost. A society that invests in creating unconsciousness, which invests in keeping people asleep so that we are just passive consumers of products and not really asking any of the questions.\u201d<\/em>
\n— Graham Hancock<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

1 Feb 2020 – <\/em>If you\u2019re in the same boat as the typical American, your dilemma might look something like this:<\/p>\n

You\u2019re enduring some type of chronic illness, over-stressed and rushed, unrewarding job, little or no savings, greatly in debt, fat mortgage, two vehicles in the driveway with a 5 or 7-year loan on each, lots of gadgets and toys to keep you occupied, huge TV, little free time for yourself due to your career and a demanding spouse, weekends filled with church and\/or senseless entertainment, and a bathroom cabinet heavily stacked with pharmaceutical tic tacs to help cope with the emptiness of it all.<\/p>\n

This is probably you and it\u2019s OK. This is considered normal in America. You are a success. You\u2019ve achieved the American Dream. Your obedience and education and hard work have paid off. Congratulations.<\/p>\n

But the problem is that you\u2019re miserable and shallow and quite possibly unhealthy and a little dispirited and you\u2019ll likely die of either heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, or suicide in the not so distant future \u2014 statistically speaking.<\/p>\n

Or you\u2019ll make it to old age with this all too common deathbed regret \u2014 wishing you had the courage to live a life true to yourself, not the life of what others expected of you.<\/p>\n

Despite living in the richest country on the planet with a gargantuan military (and budget) to keep you so-called \u201csafe,\u201d you\u2019re frightened and unhappy more than ever before. Seems your material abundance and chronic hustle and \u201cgood citizen\u201d ideals have done nothing for your happiness or well-being.<\/p>\n

In fact, this status chasing, security-obsessed, hurried American lifestyle is draining you of your life energy. It\u2019s killing you. It has been for some time. And you feel it.<\/p>\n

This article is for you. Let\u2019s go.<\/p>\n

*****<\/p>\n

The reason you don\u2019t feel alive is because you aren\u2019t alive. You\u2019re merely going through the motions in a fast-paced, consumer-centered culture that has transformed our once beautiful land into an asphalt wasteland strewed with digital billboards, fast food joints, soulless malls, and complete carnage.<\/p>\n

Your constant craving for objects and status (the American way) has robbed your life of its freedom and creative zest. You live routine and stressed and you\u2019re chained to a sluggish and predictable way of living.<\/p>\n

The less you are inwardly the more you feel the need to buy buy buy. And the more you buy the more hours you need to put in at a useless job that has your stomach riddled with ulcers. Or you go deeper into debt. Or likely both.<\/p>\n

The less-developed you are as a mindful person the more susceptible you are to the psychological conditioning of the cultural engineers. The less you\u2019re able to express yourself as a vitally alive human being the deeper the need is for you to hide behind luxuries and status.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve become what they needed you to become. And you\u2019re sick because of it.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re trying so goddamn hard to keep up with the Joneses because you lack in BEING. You can\u2019t afford that \u201chey-look-at-me\u201d lifestyle that you flaunt around but it helps decorate and perpetuate your otherwise empty image.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not all your fault. You\u2019re a victim of a fucked-up culture and the indoctrination system we call \u201ceducation.\u201d You were raised and molded in a distorted environment. Who you are today is a manifestation of the social arrangements you were accidentally and randomly born into.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not natural and it\u2019s killing you \u2014 this American life you\u2019re living.<\/p>\n

As the great social psychologist and philosopher, Erich Fromm observed:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Your life is so much more precious than the automaton it has become. I think deep down you feel it, you know it. But it\u2019s hard to break free from the chains that you can\u2019t see or the shackles you were taught to adore.<\/p>\n

As Colin Wilson wrote over a half-century ago,<\/p>\n

\u201cThese men are in prison\u2026They are quite contented in prison \u2014 caged animals who have never known freedom; but it is prison all the same.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I was talking to a nice couple the other day who had a combined six-figure salary. They told me that they were unable to come up with a measly $1000 in cash to put down on a house they were trying to buy. This is the typical American today \u2014 rich and poor at the same time.<\/p>\n

This is the American Dream and this is the definition of success in our culture \u2014 degrees, jobs, families, consumerism, and raging debt. From an early age, we were egged on to get good grades so as to get into an overpriced university to better the chances of sliding into a dull career where we end up like the person in the opening paragraph.<\/p>\n

As the feisty Los Angeles poet, Charles Bukowski, once wrote:<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidates who reminded them most of themselves.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In spite of a so-called thriving economy in the land of plenty, a great number of people still feel insecure, lonely, depressed, and suffer from a lack of enthusiasm over the miracle of their own existence. We\u2019re all bogged down and life doesn’t make sense to us because we\u2019re living so far from our nature as humans.<\/p>\n

Many of us, if not most, are too thoughtlessly caught up in the facade of culture to see what we\u2019ve become as modern people \u2014 alienated, mindless consumers patting each other on the backs for our worldly success at the expense of wreaking havoc on our inner lives and the entire ecosystem that sustains us.<\/p>\n

As the American physician and psychotherapist Alexander Lowen acknowledged:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe modern individual is committed to being successful, not to being a person. He belongs rightly to the \u2018action generation\u2019 whose motto is \u2018do more but feel less.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps mental health has little to do with the individual and more to do with the culture they were born into. It\u2019s been said before, it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.<\/em><\/p>\n

We\u2019ve been led, and yes, I do mean led, deliberately so, by persuasive, scheming forces into believing we can buy our way to security, to happiness, and, even on a deeper level, to immortality.<\/p>\n

Our deluded industrialized mindset, manufactured for us generation after generation, has us chasing empty pleasures and glittering gadgets at the cost of turning us into over-medicated debt-serfs.<\/p>\n

A 2015 article at Waking Times<\/a> asks the reader,<\/p>\n

\u201cHow did the United States, a nation founded on Puritan, non-materialistic tenants become filled with the biggest shoppers on the planet and end up occupying 29% of the World\u2019s consumer market? As it turns out, Americans were carefully and systematically manipulated into becoming insatiable shoppers.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Edward Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud who worked as a propagandist for the United States during World War I. After the war, he set himself up as a public relations counselor in New York City.<\/p>\n

At the beginning of the 20th century, Bernays used his uncle\u2019s theories on the human psyche to develop \u201cpublic relations\u201d (aka propaganda) to help control and manipulate the mindset of the masses for the corporate elite.<\/p>\n

In the words of the narration of a phenomenal must-watch documentary, The Century of the Self<\/em>, Bernays \u201cshowed American corporations for the first time how they could make people want things they didn\u2019t need by linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.\u201d<\/p>\n

Big Business used these Freudian ideas for the crooked task of indoctrinating the masses into eager, devout consumerists. And they were successful.<\/p>\n

As Jim Quinn put it in a great article<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cGenerations have been socially engineered in government schools and propagandized through the techniques of Edward Bernays by the corporate fascists to believe buying baubles, trinkets, gadgets and luxury automobiles on credit makes them wealthier, when it only makes them debt-serfs.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cKeeping up with the Joneses has been ingrained in their psyches through the conscious and intelligent manipulation of their minds by the unseen forces operating behind the curtain. Whether you call them the Deep State or the invisible government, they represent the true ruling power of the country.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Erich Fromm related our rampant consumerist society today to a soulless machine \u2014 a machine that is our God and we ourselves feel \u201cgodlike\u201d by serving the machine.<\/p>\n

And ultimately it\u2019s this machinery that gave birth to the \u201calienated character\u201d we see all around us \u2014 people alienated from their work, from themselves, from other human beings, and from nature.<\/p>\n

As Fromm put it,<\/p>\n

\u201cThe dream of being independent masters of our lives ended when we began awakening to the fact that we have all become cogs in the bureaucratic machine, with our thoughts, feelings, and tastes manipulated by government and industry and the mass communications that they control.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We the people of the United States have been led far away from the vibrant American spirit of Emerson, Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Instead of living poetic lives close to the earth with little possessions, we barricade ourselves behind drywall and plastic and sit in front of screens, constantly buying things we don\u2019t need to impress assholes who are doing the same thing.<\/p>\n

As Thoreau well understood,<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We prize HAVING over BEING, material possessions over experiences. We have contempt for nature these days and are too engrossed in the mechanical ways of living to truly FEEL what it means to be alive on this planet.<\/p>\n

Even the devout Christians among us, as far as I can see, are more influenced by our diseased culture than the \u201cgive it all away\u201d teachings of Jesus.<\/p>\n

Christians tend to be up there with the most materialistic people among us, which is ironic because they supposedly follow the teachings of the least materialistic human known to man.<\/p>\n

The culture of materialism and consumerism is our God. Yes, even among the devout.<\/p>\n

The cultural programming runs deep and it\u2019s clear to see that our hearts and minds have been severed from the sacred.<\/p>\n

As Freud pointed out in Civilization and Its Discontents: <\/em>\u201cIt is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement \u2014 that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an empty existence, this object-oriented world we live in, and everyone knows it on a spiritual level. It\u2019s not where it\u2019s at.<\/p>\n

As the character in Arthur Miller\u2019s play, \u201cThe Death of a Salesman,\u201d confesses at the end of his life: \u201cI realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been.\u201d<\/p>\n

What you and I consider \u201creality\u201d is nothing but a thin veneer of illusions and lies and hallucinations that we\u2019ve all been conditioned to agree upon.<\/p>\n

In the words of the great propagandist himself, Bernays writes:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country\u2026 We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We\u2019ve all been lured into the trap which is why we\u2019re so busy all the time running from one lame obligation to the next.<\/p>\n

What Is to Be Done?<\/strong><\/p>\n

You have to unplug from the machine and take back your life and learn to live with less and sit under trees and read the great minds and create art and listen to music and sound your \u201cbarbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Quit doing things you hate to impress the faceless people among us.<\/p>\n

Decondition yourself from culture, quit suppressing your uniqueness, travel to places that frighten you a bit, learn to embrace silence and solitude a few times a week. And most importantly \u2014 you must awaken from your culturally-induced slumber and try to find simple joy among the sacred.<\/p>\n

As Joseph Campbell so poetically voiced,<\/p>\n

\u201cThe goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with nature.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s where it\u2019s at \u2014 it\u2019s where the fullness of life reveals itself to us. Simplify, simplify, simplify, and become one with yourself. That\u2019s where, in the words of Henry Miller, \u201cthe insignificant blade of grass assumes its proper place in the universe.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no secret that the happiest people on the planet are those who live with little. With little leaves more freedom and playtime to discover our true creative genius within \u2014 our true nature. We all have it.<\/p>\n

Become the person you are, and perhaps would have been, before culture contaminated you and brought you into disharmony with yourself.<\/p>\n

As the great Tom Robbins once wrote: \u201cIf civilization is ever going to be anything but a grandiose pratfall, anything more than a can of deodorizer in the shithouse of existence, the people are going to have to concern themselves with magic and poetry.\u201d<\/p>\n

You can choose to live your life in the vital mode of BEING rather than the empty mode of HAVING.<\/p>\n

As Fromm fully understood,<\/p>\n

\u201cThe full humanization of man requires the breakthrough from the possession-centered to the activity-centered orientation, from selfishness and egotism to solidarity and altruism.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019ll end with a beautiful little poem by Czeslaw Milosz to help remind us of what so much we\u2019ve forgotten by living this hurried, American lifestyle:<\/p>\n

A day so happy.
\nFog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
\nHummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
\nThere was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
\nI knew no one worth my envying him.
\nWhatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
\nTo think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
\nIn my body I felt no pain.
\nWhen straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

_____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Erik Rittenberry<\/a> – Everything has been figured out, except how to live.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 medium.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1 Feb 2020 – We the people of the United States have been led far away from the vibrant American spirit of Emerson, Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. As Thoreau well understood, \u201cMost of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.\u201d We prize HAVING over BEING, material possessions over experiences. We have contempt for nature these days and are too engrossed in the mechanical ways of living to truly FEEL what it means to be alive on this planet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":153248,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[290,70],"class_list":["post-153247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-culture","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153247\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/153248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}