Anxiety and consumerism, are we treating life as a catalogue?
11th May 2022
I am underneath your likes and dislikes
I am underneath who you think you are
I am the base of your soul
I am the unmovable silence that embraces it all
With unconditional motherly love.
Anxiety is the constant need to be in control of the outcomes of our lives. The lack of control sends us on a psychological tailspin. This is madness, as we largely have no control over the events in our lives. Marketing and consumerism (and the book The Secret!) have so much to answer for the current mental health crisis.
By making us into consumers, they tell us we can choose the exact product we want. We must search for it, and we must pick the one that matches our ideal identity. We’ve been led to believe that this extrapolates to all areas of your lives; we want our body, our home, our career, our children, our marriage, our health to be a certain way, to look a certain way, to feel a certain way. We’re the customer, and we’re always right.
As you may have noticed, that’s not the way real life works. Life is not a catalogue in which you get to pick everything you want. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ve noticed again and again that getting what you want is not necessarily what makes you happy or what makes for a fulfilled life.
Operation your life from this customer mode comes at a tremendous cost psychologically. As we feel the constant need to think, plan and action areas of our lives so that they can be exactly how we want, how we’ve imagined, how they have sold it to us that the should be.
Feeling less anxious has a lot to do with relinquishing this need for control, with unlearning the ideas that marketing and consumerism have instilled in us. We must understand at a deep level that life is not a shop where you get to pick what you want from it. Life is so much more than that, and when you can let go of your likes and dislikes and your need to have you want, you’ll be able to experience its full glory.