Welcome to today’s lesson in awareness and consciousness. Take a good look at the meme above. In creating it, an internet artist juxtaposed a normal reality with what is presented as a girl’s life in the media. It’s not difficult to see the point the artist was making. There’s a tense discrepancy between the one’s shallowness and the other’s depth. The piece feels like the sort of thing Banksy would have done if he was a young female artist.
That tension created by the discrepancy above is what today’s blog is designed to reduce. There are undoubtedly some beautiful works of art in fashion and I applaud people’s right and freedom to wear what they like. But that is a separate issue from discussing how adults come to feel tortured. And when we delve into why, it’s almost always due to their egos, which were themselves often created and fomented by marketers and advertisers who were understandably focused on sales, and not on human development or actualisation.
Ever since brands figured out that they could also sell the idea of being stylish, attractive, smart or even beautiful to men as well as women, the onslaught to change us all became genderless. Slowly, men are seeing their lives similarly invaded by notions of perfection until, maybe in some distant future, we’ll get anywhere near where women were in the 1920’s. Today women are literally bombarded all day long with appeals to their egos and the associated myriad of ways to fail. And of course there just happens to be a cream or top or shampoo that’ll help us bounce back. And that bouncing motion is what they’re counting on.
Capitalism exists but its aspects don’t have to take control of your life. You can develop a healthy awareness that can insulate you. Next time you’re in a store waiting in line and you can see the magazines, just look at the headlines on the cover and decipher how they are tugging at your ego–how they are suggesting the importance of some ideal? What mechanisms are they using to convey that you or your life is lacking or wrong? Photoshop? A headline? A tip?
If you do this exercise for the rest of this month, you will easily notice that most modern popular magazines are quite literally about how to be a shallow person and base your happiness on your appearance and/or your reputation for being hip; they set impossible standards and create ridiculous expectations, and they encourage both narcissism and the formation of a goading ego. In fact an ego is essentially what they are selling. A Mannequin Ego, where a person gets reduced to being a walking advertisement; a hangar for products.
I love design and I love artful clothing. But you seeing something and feeling that it’s right for you is a much, much different thing than being shoehorned into something “fashionable;” which only means it’s been marketed to the point of being the tyrannical uniform of “cool.” Look around you. That’s why everyone’s dressed so uniformly. They’re literally worried about stepping out of line. No one wants to be that Gary Larson cartoon about the deer with the birthmark.
Get conscious. Witness how our egos are products that companies sell to the real us. Start making a conscious connection between that fact and your dissatisfaction with your life. I’m not saying never go shopping. Go. Enjoy. But go consciously. Don’t be buying things because they’re in alignment with what your social media feed told you you’ll get “liked” for. But what you–the real you–feels natural in. That’s the path to more peace of mind.
Watch your newsfeeds. Watch your TV and Web series. Watch your magazines and listen to your radio ads. Get out of your busy thoughts by focusing instead on who originally put those dissatisfied voices in there in the first place.
Start today. Become more conscious and more spiritually connected by seeing through the ego utilized in advertising. Because on the other side of that is a kind of peace, satisfaction and contentment that far surprasses the feelings that any external thing could ever give you.
Now go use your powerful mind to go create a worthwhile day. And keep your eye out for manipulations to your thinking.
peace. s
Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organizations locally and around the world.
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
This week the Dose is all about how you see things. We’ve got instructions on changing your perspective, we share a new look at an old world, we see how art can expose our sense of perception and we’ll end with an ad-man talking about perceived value. We’ll start off first with WikiHow’s instructions on changing your mind:
Next we’ll check out a short of video of a sculpture that I can only assume was done by the filmmaker, Gary Bruno Schmid. It really shows you that your perspective can change reality quite a bit:
And for those who are dedicated to the idea of exploring their perspectives and how they might be manipulated, I offer you this TED Talk by sociologist-ad-man Rory Sutherland:
We are swimming in a sea of ideas with a varying perspective. There’s just too much up for grabs for you to be able to have any certainty about what to do so you might as well relax, be yourself and become active in life and see where that leads. You are the genius of your own life. Don’t be penned in by limiting thoughts.
peace. s
Scott McPherson is a writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and nonprofit organizations around the world.
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
When people ask me to define the psychological/spiritual advantage my accident gave me in just a sentence, I’ll often say that I saw things for what they were and that I didn’t mistake words for things. This is entirely accurate, but to be truly helpful it’s time I gave that statement a bit more detail.
When you’re like me and you can see through words here’s the kinds of strange things you notice: people will tell you that they love progress and new things but you’ll note that they’ve just been brainwashed because in many cases the new thing is much, much worse for the person than the old thing was. The two best examples we have are so huge, and we spent so much money on them, that they clearly demonstrate our willingness to actually trade more for less if we’re told it’s an improvement.
Rolling Stone magazine did an entire issue surrounding the quality of MP3 recordings. Producers don’t like MP3’s because they hold less information than CD’s which limits their creative freedom in way it previous wasn’t, so music marketers sold the idea that this recording wouldn’t skip when you jogged or in your car, even though too few people jog and there were even fewer at the time, and I never remember anyone listing CD skipping as a major car issue. Besides, music is about listening to art. Why would we care more about convenience than the art itself? That’s like we’re doing with our food, where we’re starting to care less about it being tasty and nutritious in favour of it being fast and mobile, practically given to us in toothpaste tubes that we can quickly inject into ourselves as we rush from our first job to our second or third. (You may notice that’s why the wrap is replacing the sandwich.)
Next, people used to press between seven and ten buttons on a phone to be in a position to actually hear the other person. We could hear their tone, their mood, and I never remember a couple coming to me because they were looking at ending their marriage over a phone call that went bad. But texting? I cannot tell you the number of times that the couple in front of me is there because of a 140 character facebook status, tweet or especially a text. So now we hit hundreds of keys and young kids are getting repetitive stress injuries all so that we can communicate in a slower, far less effective way. Sure, texts can be useful. But most people have replaced basic conversations with them and way more often than not the communication was either meaningless or it could have been done more quickly with a call and some voices.
Another major area I saw this related to my age. Just as I was growing up the fitness craze started. When I was a kid the only adults that went to gyms were professional body builders and boxers. No one else. But then automation started to take over, more people were driving, fewer were walking, food was beginning to be processed, so it was loaded with fat and sugar and people started to suddenly put on a lot of weight. So what my brain noticed was that all of these people had worked to pay for conveniencesthat that in the end only incurred more time and more expense because now they had to get a gym membership. This weird insanity continued to the point where I saw a fitness club in my city where you could sit in the lobby and literally watch people ride up the escalator to the gym where they would go in, change and then pay money to climb fake stairs!
Our bodies were built over a long time to do specific things just like any animal. And if you start changing those things you will change the animal. So people are sold iNDEPENDENCE and in turn they get loneliness where they sit alone in front a screen looking at life rather than what they used to do, which is take the energy they used to have for joy and they would go out with their friends. But by 30-35 years old most people aren’t seeing their friends that much, but they’ll be likely to be working very long hours to pay for all of their conveniences.
This is all insanity. Your life isn’t better because your phone is better, or because your car is faster, or because your TV is bigger. You don’t enjoy the championship game 30% more because your screen is 30% bigger. Sorry, the guy listening to the game on a radio is maxing out his excitement so there’s no beating 100%.
We’ve all been sold a bill of goods. We’ve been convinced to do things that, if we look at them closely, we realize have no real benefit to us. We’re working for weeks to get enough after-tax dollars to be able to buy the car model with Navigation because we have FOMO, even though we barely ever drive to anywhere we haven’t been before and even if we are, someone else can tell us how to get there just like before. So we work all of these extra hours to get this shiny bauble when in fact we would have drew more joy from some free time talking with a good friend.
We have to start doing far better accounting of our joy. Because we will quickly learn that the reason people go camping to quiet, remote, undeveloped places on their weekends is because it’s slower and it doesn’t include all of those conveniences. We want simplicity, quiet, and companionship. The healthiest people you know are the ones who eat like 100 years ago, who work their bodies like 100 years ago, and who have positive social relations not tons of likes.
Your life won’t improve if you just put your head down and watch the ads and do as you’re told. It really is crazy for you to spend your life stressed because you bought some expensive thing to impress people and now you own it, but it owns your joy. You have to start being slower and more judicious with your money. Because you give up a lot of life for that power to spend, so spend it wisely. Spend it on things that bring joy and goodness to your life, rather than things that—if you really stopped to think about it—really don’t make much sense. So stop hiring another kid to cut your lawn or shovel your walks when you’re in your basement working out. Because if you can’t see that’s crazy, then you’re very deep inside the illusion that the Buddha was warning you about.
Be free. Spend less on things and more on creating time. Ask yourself, does this create more time or less time? Because it might save an hour, but if you had to work an extra two to buy it, you’re actually an hour down. Remember: use after-tax dollars, not pre-tax dollars when figuring out what something costs your life. Because that’s the real measure, and it almost instantly makes many more things look much more expensive because that’s what they really are.
Here’s to your freedom. Here’s to more joy, more time with people you care about, and a more fulfilling life. Because no one was on their death bed asking someone to collect all of their stuff. No one is saying, just one last tweet, just one last selfie. No, they want to hold hands and look into the eyes of the people they loved. If they had more time it would be for that, not another social media post. So remember that while you’re walking around every day. Because if your attention is one place, it’s not some place else. And right now other people decide where your attention is more than you do and it’s time you changed that. Here’s to freedom and time. That’s real wealth.
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
Concepts like governments, laws, religions, or education or legal systems all create many ways for people to feel they are wrong. In the case of some religions you were even born wrong and your life is almost a form of apology where you try to make up for your failings to God. So we feel we owe God perfect behaviour, we feel we owe our parents and the system good grades, we feel like we owe it to society to obey laws—even the ones we don’t agree with.
Even the economy itself with its symbolic money means that you can now actually fail at just being alive. Born in Africa in a poverty-stricken war-torn country? Don’t have access to education or health care? Then too bad, you lose, because you won’t have the money to buy the food that you used to get for free from the Earth itself. But now someone invented the concept of ownership and then people needed guns to protect the things they owned and so now those fruits belong to someone else which means they don’t belong to you. A person somewhere else—someone with money—can eat it, but not the guy who picked it. That’s how silly our world is. We’ll actually let the picker die of starvation rather than let him eat. We’ll have the simple inexpensive medicines to save his life, but we won’t give them to him without the money.
Because modern life is loosely based on the rather undefined concept of progress, people will feel like they’re failing even if they’re standing still—because things like advertising or where they are on the bell curve at school will lead them to believe that everyone else is working harder than they are. So progress would be to work harder. And so modern life is set up around wants, which necessitates us starting from a position where we’re lacking, and effort or hard work will make up the difference between us and success.
So advertising or our church or our boss tells us we’re missing something and we need to earn the right to have it, and then we can check off the box that says we can stop beating ourselves up, (which in turn leads us into the habit of beating others up as well). Think about how much strife is caused by parents pushing for better grades and think of how incredibly seldom those grades mattered to the quality of life the person ends up leading. There is no relationship between external success and internal happiness, so why are we willing to sacrifice so much of the latter in an attempt to get the former?
So many people feel they are starting behind, and that where they are now can’t possibly be good enough. They tend to manage their lives based on avoiding the pain of failure rather than on cultivating a life that enables our natural satisfaction and appreciation to exist unfettered by thoughts about what’s missing or how we need more. Think about it. What if a God you totally believed in came down, proved his power to you, and then ordered you to be happy because he deemed you perfect. Hey! Good for you! Praise by God! Now what?
We don’t need to beat ourselves into doing a good job. If what we’re doing has any kind of value at all then capable, open people will always find a way to invest themselves in that work. People that work in the arts will try to make things that you like or enjoy or approve of or maybe hate. But the true artists among them will just be being themselves whether you like it or not. So there’s a career that at its zenith experiences no social pressure whatsoever. They can do like Klein and paint an entire canvass one shade of blue and still they can have happy lives and survive all the judgment. Because you’re not living a spiritual life if you’re conforming to what everyone else wants. You’re living a spiritual life when you realize with absolute certainty that even if there wasn’t a single rule in the universe, you would still be made of love and your pure self could act like nothing else.
It’s time to stop beating yourself up using your ability to think. You weren’t supposed to tell yourself stories where you’re the villain. Save thinking for remembering directions or traffic rules or something. But don’t apply it like you’re some kind of judge and jury to yourself. There was no crime here. There is nothing wrong with you other than the fact that you keep comparing your perfection to other people’s perfection. Your problem isn’t who you are. Your only problem is who you think you are. So stop all the chatter and just be instead. Because that would be just perfect. 😉
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
Yesterday I covered the culture of fear that has been created by politics and the news media and how that affects parenting and the brain development of children. Today we’ll talk about how social media and advertising combine to create an entirely new set of forces that are shaping your children’s minds in ways that have never been seen before. Some of it is exciting and awesome. Some of it is troubling and dangerous.
Again, it’s important to remember how different the world is than just a short time ago. A surfable smartphone didn’t exist until 1996 but due to capability and production limits they weren’t really in our consciousness until about 2001. Facebook was created in 2004, and Twitter in 2006 (even Google was just getting started in 1998), so at the time of this writing none of the people who’ve grown up with these influences are even adults yet so researchers can’t study the effects.
I heard a stat the other day that either this year or last year, 90% of the photos taken in history had been taken that year. That is a huge indicator of how incredibly important cameras have become. I have maybe 50 photos in total of me from a baby to age 25. Some friends whose parents were more technically motivated used cameras more often and they would have more, but it was expensive processing pictures back then very few people went crazy. But the fact that 90% of photos were taken last year shows how insanely different the numbers are today. A child will have more photos taken of them in a month than they would have had in a lifetime. And so that lens—that eye—becomes one of the eyes they understand they should pay attention to.
How this plays out is that if you’re talking to someone and you hold your camera up to take a photo, they’re quite likely to mug for you, or give you their best angle. So just the very appearance of a camera changes the social setting and people interrupt their human conversation for a machine-based ego-focused interaction. We all see this with text messages when we’re having lunch with a friend as well. It’s now common for people to not look at or pay attention to their tablemates for large percentages of their time at the table.
What this does is get the kids who are watching believing that phones are more important than people because that is exactly the behaviour everyone is actually modelling. So what I’m seeing now is kids who will choose to look at a camera lens or cell phone screen instead of looking at the people they’re with. So rather than learning how to socialize and read facial and body language cues, instead they learn how to look down and spend time in a place that exists only in their imagination—a place called cyberspace.
It’s very important for parents to remember that we all live where our consciousness is. So if you’re sitting on a beautiful beach alone thinking about how 10 years ago you were on this beach with a love you have since lost—despite all of the pleasures available on the beach today, the person will be sad because in their consciousness they are reliving 5 years ago and comparing it to today.
The same is true for kids except they travel less in time and more in space. I walked to school with all of my neighbourhood friends. Kids today primarily get driven or take the bus so they can have friends that live two buses away. So they might be physically at home because their parents never let them go anywhere without some detailed plan, but in reality they’re meeting their friends in cyberspace. The important part about that is that if your kid can always meet their friends in cyberspace then, in a way, it’s like their friends are present for every single thing that happens in your house. Technology has changed society much more than people currently recognize.
Privacy for all intents and purposes no longer exists. By 16 every kid knows your email can be hacked, friends can choose to share photos they were never supposed to share, there’s revenge porn sites and robots are crawling through everything you write and post in an attempt to understand you well enough to help advertisers sell to you when you’re most vulnerable. There’s even video and audio systems that detect crying so that they can respond. Do we really want robots responding to crying?
I’m hardly anti-technology. I was the first person I knew with a digital watch, the first with a programmable calculator and both a video recorder and a video camera. I was the second person I knew to get a computer and I started a large BBS system before the internet even existed. So I’m pro-technology in many ways. But with all things we must weigh the advantages against the costs. And the costs of social media are almost as high as the costs of advertising.
So where politics and the news media lead new citizens to be unnecessarily afraid, advertising leads them to be insecure. Secure people don’t need a product to fix their insecurity. So when I was young everyone thought teeth should be teeth-coloured and so no one would have put harmful chemicals in our mouths to whiten them. But today kids will feel stressed if their teeth aren’t unnaturally white. Go backwards and my mother never knew mouthwash until she was older. And her mother never even knew tooth-brushing or that breath should smell “fresh” until she was ten years old because advertising had not created that insecurity yet. The entire tooth-brushing fresh breath movement emerged out of advertisers testing the idea of whether or not a fear could be created and leveraged into a product. Obviously it worked and now every kid has a huge list of things to feel insecure about.
Advertisers need you to think the jeans you bought last year aren’t good enough for this year. Same with your hair style and your shoes and your purse and your car. There is always a new way to be acceptable or impressive to others. There’s always something new to buy. But do you see what this is telling the brain? The brain is being told that the person is not okay being who they are they must be someone else in order to be accepted, which in other terms means that the love they receive is conditional. It is based on their alignment with what advertisers have deemed acceptable rather than being loved just for who you are right from birth. The idea that you have to add to or change yourself before you are worthy is as unfortunate as it is dangerous.
You don’t need different jeans or a different hair colour. You don’t need different music or to like different movies. You just need to love yourself. Because you’re parenting when you’re living. Just like those kids watch smart phone screens because you do, they also worry about their hair and weight because you do. So if you really want to parent in an amazing way that will strengthen and support your kids to be all they can be, then stop worrying about the bad things that might happen or the judgments they might face, and instead focus on realizing the natural greatness that lives within yourself, because that will teach your children to look for that strength and capability within themselves. And that’s all they need to do. Because it’s always there waiting.
Your kids live in a sea of other people telling them who they should be. Be the one person who stands out for not telling them who it would be good or positive or healthy to become, and instead just ask them who they would most like to become and then help them do that. Because if Michelangelo’s father had had his way his son would have been a bricklayer and we wouldn’t have the incredible Statue of David. So don’t get in the way of your kid’s David. Don’t help frighten them into being small and worried. The world is too awesome for that and it will only be made more awesome by the contributions of you and your children.
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
I do not envy the people struggling to pull off raising a child in the new millennium. There are challenges today that have never existed before, and many routes through life that most parents have never even considered as a part of their parenting options. But if we want healthy children then we must consciously give them an environment that promotes both their physical and mental health as well as the ongoing maintenance of both.
In creating this post I came to learn that it is best presented as a four-parter that includes last week’s Friday Dose (which includes a set of links to relevant documentaries etc.), and yesterday’s Other Perspectives. In this posting I will cover the culture of fear and the value of freedom, mistakes and the nature of growth. In the next I’ll cover advertising, ego, insecurity and inter-personal connection.
First off, let’s remember how different it is for kids now that just a short time ago, because these are the biggest changes that the human brain has had to face since the construct of abstract language. This is big. Really big.
Let’s talk about children’s media environment rather than just the internet. When I was a kid you were too focused on playing outside to really find TV all that inviting. Yeah you had your big shows you watched, but we only had three channels so even until the invention of video tape there was no way to even see a re-run. The three channels shut off at 1am and turned back on at 6am and that was it. That meant we used to be influenced primarily by our family’s values and the values of their friends and the immediate culture you lived in. Today you’re influenced by your friends and peers even at home—via social media—but more importantly you are influenced by two additional groups, and those groups do not have the same agenda for your life that you have at all.
Politics and advertising create most of the current zeitgeist. Countries used to be much more unique, and while they still are to some degree, the spreading of media has homogenized the whole world. People are dressing more alike, listening to the same music, and eating the same foods. What’s important is that the homogenization was designed by people who had a motive. Your motive is to raise your kids to be happy, successful, good-quality citizens who can contribute to their culture in a meaningful way all while building a life they find to be largely secure, rewarding and enjoyable. Politicians want you and your kids to vote for them, and advertisers want you to to get you and your kid’s money. How this shapes your brain is no small issue.
A key political strategy almost everywhere is to create an us by creating a them. The them is generally another society you can compare yourself against—so when your own country is in political turmoil politicians create an enemy. Maybe that’s a war with another country, or maybe it’s stoking fears at home about who among us might be untrustworthy or dangerous. It’s very easy to ask people to support your politics if you want to stop crime or violence. Who doesn’t want to do that? But there’s tons of research: jails don’t stop crime and there’s no indication laws do either. The one thing that science has proven over and over is that the easiest, cheapest way to stop crime is to make a solid investment in early childhood development. Norway did that and ended up having to close a large number of their jails.
At this writing there’s an upcoming Canadian election. This man was a politician but I’m not attempting to influence anyone politically. My use of it is strictly for the quote.
Now the fact is that, no matter where you are, there have never been fewer criminals and there’s never been less violent crime. Never. Anywhere. And yet in survey after survey people are worried about what might happen. The biggest fear I hear about is abduction, and yet this is remarkably unlikely. Yes, agencies that get their funding for children’s protection will give you statistics that don’t mention they include stats on every divorced spouse who was turned in for having their own kids back to their vengeful spouse one hour late. Think about how seldom you hear an Amber Alert. Hardly ever. And when you do, you almost always learn it’s one of the parents or a grandparent that has taken the kids away from a situation they (rightly or wrongly) feel is bad for the kid. That’s not the sort of abduction that they do fear-laden TV shows about.
Cases where it isn’t someone known to the kid are so rare they make international news. Remember the British girl who went missing in Spain? That was 2007. Or the little girl who was kidnapped and murdered in Toronto? That was 2009. Just try to think of them and you realize there’s hardly any and there’s billions of people who’s children can make the news. If you were in poorest parts of Asia or Africa or South America I can see being concerned about your kids being grabbed because there’s an easy profit motive there—mostly so they can sell them to rich white people. But for the average North American, European, or even most Asians, Africans or South Americans, there is no rational reason to worry about your kids every day.
The number one place by far for a child to die is in a car with their parents. So why are parents so casual about driving around, and yet people are getting complaints from schools and parents, or their kids are even being taken by police or child services because parents let them walk to school??? So we don’t worry at all about the still-very-unlikely but much much much more likely stuff? Instead we’re going to freak out our kids by worrying about things as likely as lightening strikes? If you’re doing this you need to realize that you’ve been living in a culture of fear and it is adversely affecting your children.
Children learn from experience but adults can get like insurance mathematicians who are busy calculating the extreme potential downsides to every single thing that the child even might do. A woman in an interview said that she wouldn’t let a 10 year old and a six year old walk home alone because if something happened she didn’t think the 10 year old would know what to do. When the reporter asked what sort of things might happen outside of the aformentioned highly unlikely worst case scenarios, the best the woman could come up with was that the six year old might fall. Fall? From the height of a six year old? Oh yeah, you need maturity and a medical degree to deal with that, don’t you?
Let’s not be ridiculous. Can something happen? Of course, the aforementioned girl in Toronto was walking with her brother but he regretfully left her to walk another kid home. But it’s important to place that in the appropriate context, which is that hundreds of millions of young people made it to school just fine that day and hundreds of other days entirely safely. So why would anyone presume to load their kid with the entirely unrealistic fear that they have to limit the child’s life in the hopes of lengthening it? To avoid something incredibly unlikely? Generations of kids walked to school. I never ever remember hearing of a kid falling on the way to school and getting hurt. And even if they did, we’re going to limit the hundreds of millions of kids lives to try to potentially save one all while we’re losing thousands in cars?! It doesn’t even make sense.
We are teaching children to be afraid. Youngish parents write to me as though it’s the generation behind them that’s afraid, but my generation can easily see that there was a change, and for those paying close attention, it showed up when TV and later the internet took off. Kids didn’t used to read the paper. But they could overhear the news. And as more stations were created there was more competition for advertisers and so the news got increasingly sensationalized in the fight to get people to advertise to. News stations then went to 24 hours, so they had to find and even create news. As I’m writing this Fox news was just noted world wide for having had to apologize four times in a single day for reporting fear-mongering things that they later admitted were based on absolutely nothing. So why did those alarming stories get reported if they were made up? Because they would attract viewers. That’s great for shareholders but very bad for your kid.
We’re also teaching children to be weaker. There are studies going on regarding why kids increasingly have no sense of direction. What they know so far is that modern brain scans show we all have neurons that keep track of where the sun is as you walk, and with experience it helps your brain understand where things are in relation to each other. So there’s no such thing as a bad sense of direction, there are just unpracticed and undeveloped senses of direction. But if a kid gets driven everywhere, how are those brain structures going to get built? They can’t. And so the kid becomes smaller than the parent when the idea is that the parent helps the kid be bigger than they themselves ever could have been.
You only have two jobs as a parent: to teach your kids what they need to know to live without you, and to love them. Of course they need to know they are loved, but they also need to know how the world actually works. Insulating them from that is literally constructing an incapable kid and it’s why we’re increasingly seeing parents showing up to conduct their kids job interviews. My instructions to the companies I advise is to never hire these individuals because their parents are very obviously proving that they have built a child that is actually entirely unprepared for the workplace, or likely even society in general.
Sitting in a jungle four degrees off the equator and most of the way up a 4,200 meter (14,000 foot) mountain I asked an anthropologist what she had learned from the tribes she had studied for 23 years. She told me it was that she had unwittingly but grossly underestimated her children. We saw children as young as five walking across tree trunks to cross very high gorges and they would do so without an adult nearby. They were trusted and they responded to that trust by simply watching the people around them, all of whom walked confidently across the makeshift bridge. And then the kids did what every kid does—and they mimicked it.
So you can teach your child to mimic fear. Or you can teach them to act confidently. Because in 23 years that anthropologist never, ever heard of one of those kids falling. And even if one did, that wouldn’t change those parents. Because they’re not busy worrying. They’re not guided by fears about jaguars or snakes. They’re busy living a good life and in doing so they’re showing their kids how to do the very same thing. And every kid needs parenting like that. So who’s teaching your kids to avoid fear and enjoy life?
peace. s
Note: Tomorrow we’ll talk about how advertising and social media are changing how children’s brains are structured and what that means for them/you as adults.
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
Ever since the concepts of sane and crazy were invented everyone has spent at least some time wondering if they’re nuts. But what if there was a test that you could administer to yourself that told you conclusively if you were or not? What then? Because such a test actually exists and I will give it to you in this blog.
Okay, are you ready? Go to a mirror or hold one up to your face, or use that mirror app on your phone. Take a good look at yourself. Do you look human? If the answer is “yes” then you’re crazy. Because all humans are crazy. How do I know? Because if I didn’t know that then I couldn’t properly write this blog. I’ll explain.
Everyone lives inside their own thinking. What the Buddhists call the illusion is the layer of words and descriptions and opinions that we layer over the real world which simply Is. Through poignant events, or rapturous moments, everyone spends some time in an enlightened state. When we’re laughing and thrilled with life. When we’re exhilarated and fully alive. It’s whenever we’re appreciating the Isness of things. The healthiest people do that by choice and they do it often. So people caught up in the illusion will argue over whether a movie or a book was good or bad, whereas someone who can see through the illusion finds the whole discussion meaningless.
An enlightened person can appreciate that everyone lives inside their thinking and so people don’t see a book or a movie, they see their thoughts about it. So knowing that, it seems so unnecessarily unfortunate that good friends would invest any amount of life getting into arguments over their opinions. What difference does that make? Why would you ruin your day to have a pointless debate where you both compare beliefs that exist only in your own consciousness? Even if you won that argument, what did you win? So to the contrary, an enlightened person can even be called crazy and they’re okay with it. Because they know everyone looks crazy to a lot of people.
To a meek non-physical safety conscious administrator, working as a whitewater rafting guide or a heli-skiing guide can look crazy. But then then the professional skier probably thinks much the same thing about the administrator in his little cubicle all day staring at a screen. Someone giving a speech or doing a radio show can seem insanely brave to a quiet person, and yet to a talk show host, they might find being alone a huge challenge whereas the quiet person likes it. Likewise a guy going to school and getting into debt for a decade past high school so that he can be a doctor and swab sores and stick his fingers in people’s bums—that can look insane to a kid who’s getting good money to work outdoors at a job that keeps him in peak physically shape. Meanwhile the doctor is relieved he doesn’t have to live a life of menial labour. So what’s crazy? It depends completely on who you ask.
Having kids, not having kids, being married, not being married, this job, that job and on and on and on. We’re all just walking swirls of opinion and when we get in proximity to the opinions that make up other people—if our opinions are too solid they tend to impact other very solid opinions. But if we’re more ephemeral and flexible and open, then we can pass through each other and feel the experience without it containing a harsh impact.
Go ahead and be crazy. Know that there’s people who will view your life from the outside and they will have harsh and negative and incorrect opinions. But whatever. How does that actually affect you? Even if they say it, words are just sound waves hitting your eardrums. They don’t demand that you engage with them.
You can be open to others views even if they’re about you. After all, you have some opinions about other people too. But instead of sharing them or even complaining about them, how about if—as much as possible—we all stayed conscious of our thinking and we just dropped the combative thoughts about differing opinions? And not just our internal thinking, where we poke at their statements even as they’re speaking. I mean the external talk too. The arguments, the put-downs, the needless opinions. That should all be muted as much as possible. We should favour input over output.
Instead of spreading negativity, what if we also focused on what we do like about the world? Because there is no point in striving to be seen as sane or healthy or smart or successful in the eyes of someone else. Their opinion lives only inside their head, and whoever else they can convince to believe it too. But there’s seven billion people in the world. They don’t all have to like you regardless of the reason. And even the ones that are your friends don’t have to agree with you about everything. So just relax and listen to people without feeling that their views have anything to do with you. Do that and people will still think you’re crazy. But at least you won’t care because you’ll be enjoying life so much more.
I hope you enjoyed reading today’s blog as much as I enjoy writing them. Thanks for your time. Have an awesome day.
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
I wrote yesterday about the intense focus that is placed on us as individuals. We surrender real life to pursue hollow activities that reflect life. We believe we’re connected because we’re current and hip and in-the-know, but we’re also rushed and harried and worried and incomplete. We squeeze little moments of joy into lives filled with obligations to beeps and clicks and bells and flashes. We think we’re succeeding when all we’ve done is bought-in. I know you think about this but it’s time to do some real meditation. Don’t just ponder the thought, bitch about it and move on. Actually ask what changes you could make that would impact your life in a positive way. Just that one simple, sincere meditation would easily expose that you do tons of things that have little reward and a much bigger price than you’ve ever really calculated. There’s some great advice in here. Squeeze a bit of it into your day:
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Yesterday I also talked a bit about how advertising infects our idea of what our lives should look like. Rather than looking for overall value and enjoyment of our experiences, we instead look for a list of things or places or activities which we can check off as having belonged to us. I find this one of the most obvious and yet unnoticed aspects to human ego: a huge percentage of our lives are dictated by beliefs we have which were formed by people whose motivation was to make money, not make our lives better. Much like people who make military hardware, advertisers are putting considerable human capability into making the world worse. These are smart and capable people. Can you imagine what the world might look like if we had everyone oriented toward making a better world rather than a more profitable one? Jerry Seinfeld does a great job of illustrating this point with his Clio acceptance speech. It’s as enlightening as it is enjoyable:
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Russell Brand is a star because he’s talented and because his originality plays well in public. He’s a guy who’s worn dresses and challenged some pretty basic ideas about life. Like Louis CK or George Carlin or even Jon Stewart, he’s a comedian who’s more a philosopher at heart. Like Sacha Baron Cohen’s character Borat, Brand exists to draw attention to the inconsistencies in our belief systems. He challenges our values and suggests another path. The establishment see him as entertainment or even craziness. But if you listen closely, he makes way way way more sense than any advertiser ever has. The fact that most of us are more comfortable with the advertising than the originality of Brand is a sign of how brainwashed we’ve all become. Almost everything he’s saying has already been scientifically proven to be true. So why does it sound so strange? That’s a question worth asking yourself:
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Spend more time with your friends. Spend less of your time focusing on products and services. And engage yourself with your own spiritual sense. Do that and your life will improve, guaranteed.
peace. s
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The Friday Dose is a collection of cool, interesting and surprising things that are chosen for their potential to distract you away from any painful thought loops that may currently be disrupting your sense of perspective. Focus on these and change your mind. Enjoy.
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
I need help with a strange addiction. I’m not overweight and I don’t overeat. But I’ve learned I will overeat under certain circumstances. Last month my sister was visiting and she kept laughing at my “Pavlovian” behaviour. She observed that I always went to get food during commercials on TV. I was suspicious of her motives when she mentioned it, and saying I did it “every time” felt ridiculous. So I watched myself over the last few months and I’ve been surprised. I didn’t get up during lots of commercials but the truth is I WANTED to get up every single time. I was surprised at how badly I wanted to get up and how important the kitchen seemed. Is Pavlovian behaviour the same as addictive behaviour? Is there a way for people to change that?
signed,
Ad-dicted
Dear Ad,
Not so strange really. Addictions all work the same way in the world of the Mind so it doesn’t matter if you’re hooked on meth, food, exercise or getting angry, the mental function is the same just the subject is different.
Here’s how your addiction works. First off, to be like Pavlov’s Dog you need the person you spend a lot of time with doing repetitive patterns of bell-ringing and feeding. Because it’s the repetition that causes your brain to start to expect it, and as the Buddhists always say; expectation leads to suffering. So the bell rings, salivating starts but the food doesn’t show this time. So they know the salivating isn’t about the food, it’s now about the bell. So your bell is the commercials you watch and as a result the capitalists who run corporate television are people with a huge amount of very subtle influence over you.
Your brain knows everything by association. So things are all linked together in a big flat database that makes ideas out of other ideas. So like Pavolv’s dog and the bell, advertisers know that your brain associates certain sights and sounds with eating. So sizzling and dripping cheese and creamy beverages are things your brain associates with consuming food. And a lot of TV advertising is for food. So you start off your TV-watching career and you’re just watching TV. But over time Campbells and Kellogs and McDonalds and Burger King all ring their bells and urge your senses. You cave in 10% of the time, then 20%, then 30% and by the time your sister visits you’re at 100% without even noticing it happened. Because you weren’t experiencing an addiction, you were just hungry. The real question is why?
I was teaching a group once and a couple had a young son we’ll call Brett. We were at the part in the course where we’re talking about egos and how they form and I noted that they should watch their son as he’s about at the right age, and that when the ego first presents they’ll usually ascribe the voice to somewhere just because their brains know that voices come from somewhere. So maybe it’s a stuffed animal or more likely an invisible friend, but they eventually develop an excuse for that voice and they get so used to thinking that way that we eventually become blind to it and we don’t realize we are no longer seeing the world we are seeing our thoughts about the world. But before they could even start to watch for Brett’s ego, he introduced it to them.
They had just finished lunch and Angela had belted the two other boys into their car seats in the second row and she’d climbed into the driver’s seat of the van when she looked in the rear view mirror and she could see Brett looking around the van quickly, as though he was tracking something. Angela jumped out of the van, opened the side door and leaned into the third row where Brett was. “Are you okay? Is there a bee in the van Brett?” She was concerned because she’d told her husband for several weeks to deal with the hive the bees had built in the eaves of the garage. But Brett shook his head. No bee.
“I… I… I think… it’s a voice.”
“A voice?” His brow wrinkled as he considered a weird idea. “Yeah. I think it’s in my head.” Angela is immediately fascinated because of where we are in the course. “You hear a voice in your head Brett?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s it saying?” Brett gives this a good think before finally replying, “It says it wants Chicken McNuggets.” “What?!?!” Angela responded, horrified. “Brett we just ate.” Brett nodded his agreement. “I know. I’m not hungry. But it says it wants Chicken McNuggets.”
“It.” At first it’s so strange they see it as separate from themselves. Because it is. Those words aren’t the kid’s. They belong to the parent or a character on TV or a commercial. The kid is just replaying them. “Don’t you eat those cookies!” they’ll hear as they then quietly steal cookies. Soon that voice is so ubiquitous, so consistent, so common that we cease to differentiate it from ourselves. We become word-based, symbol-based people with mechanical reactions and interactions. We do what we’re told is right not necessarily what we feel is right.
So you’re like little Brett only farther along. You’ve lived like this a while and so your voice is so subtle it’s invisible. Then your schedule created an opportunity for you to spend more time with some professional brainwashers who have used TV and your natural senses against you to create a need for a Big Mac at ten at night. But if you’re too tired to go get one, you’ll still go to the fridge and grab a slice of cheese….
The nice thing is that this is something that can be made conscious. You’ll start by catching yourself after you’ve eaten. Or as your making it. But because you’re watching for it you’ll see it sooner and sooner as your senses sharpen. Eventually you will be able to sense the desire to go, and you’ll stop it all in one deft motion. You need only familiarize yourself with yourself. Don’t presume you know you very well at all. You’re driven by those little Brett-voices. Unless you get conscious, you’ll be whoever they told you to be. So it’s good for you to become aware of what they taught you to say to yourself.
In the end this is a totally breakable habit and it’s not even hard. Just start interrupting it and eventually it will disappear due to a lack of use. Almost the same way it was formed. Just think of something different. It’s that easy. It really is.
I do hope you’ve found this helpful. Because I don’t want your diet and ergo your health dictated to you by a corporate entity with no soul. But whether you continue to eat that food or not, please enjoy your day either way.
peas. s 😉
P.S. You might also be interested in reading Cruel People.
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
This week’s Friday Dose is all about the kinds of beauty that the media can’t sell you anything for. If people—particularly women—are comfortable with their bodies and selves, then they don’t really need anything from outside of themselves to feel good. They don’t need creams or enhancers or concealers or Spanx or worst—to hide.
“Beauty” and “fake” essentially have the same meaning when it comes to women’s appearances. I’ve written about it many times (e.g. Being Beautiful, Cruel People etc.). If a company can’t sell you anything then they need to convince you that you’re wrong the way you already are. That is entirely their job. Advertisers make you think you need products because they teach you there’s an ideal you should be striving for. You know what ideal you should be realizing? The real you. Unadorned, unadulterated, unaltered, unpurchased you. Your beauty does not come from a tube or pill or surgery. Your beauty is innately an aspect of your very being.
We’ll start with photographer Jade Beall who rather accidentally discovered that there were a lot of women longing to see themselves represented more honestly. Now, thanks to social networking, all of us are potential publishers, so it’s not just the people selling something that can spread images. I like that these were popular and if these images were in the media more, women wouldn’t be so stressed about completely acceptable, normal and yes beautiful changes to themselves:
Next we’ll knock down another media barrier. Our perspectives change drastically as we age, which is why many of the insults that young people hurl at older people just bounce off without effect. We know they simply don’t have enough perspective to know what they’re talking about. Sorry kids, but for the most part the media’s completely brainwashed you into liking what they want you to like, and about the best you can do is try to do the opposite, but even that is a form of imitation. Even an anti-social person is letting society decide who they are. The very best part about ageing is the gain of wisdom and experience that allows us to see through all of that salesmanship. There will certainly be innocents who will find something like this unacceptable or even funny. But if they’re lucky enough to live long enough, they too will come to recognize the short-sightedness of their vision:
And finally we’ll end on a discussion about ageing. This radio documentary asks people of different ages what it’s like to be those ages and how their perspectives have changed. They’re wonderfully honest and frank and the result is a journey of self discovery for the listener. I was amazed at how many of these ideas I had never really thought much about and yet when I heard them I immediately knew them to be true. Download the podcast, listen to it online… it doesn’t matter. But if you’re in the right head-space, it’s a fascinating look at something that will happen to all of us. It certainly nothing to be afraid of. The world just gets cooler and more interesting to me every day. Enjoy:
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
Welcome to today’s lesson in awareness and consciousness. Take a good look at the meme above. In creating it, an internet artist juxtaposed a normal reality with what is presented as a girl’s life in the media. It’s not difficult to see the point the artist was making. There’s a tense discrepancy between the one’s shallowness and the other’s depth. The piece feels like the sort of thing Banksy would have done if he was a young female artist.
Capitalism exists but its aspects don’t have to take control of your life. You can develop a healthy awareness that can insulate you. Next time you’re in a store waiting in line and you can see the magazines, just look at the headlines on the cover and decipher how they are tugging at your ego–how they are suggesting the importance of some ideal? What mechanisms are they using to convey that you or your life is lacking or wrong? Photoshop? A headline? A tip?
Get conscious. Witness how our egos are products that companies sell to the real us. Start making a conscious connection between that fact and your dissatisfaction with your life. I’m not saying never go shopping. Go. Enjoy. But go consciously. Don’t be buying things because they’re in alignment with what your social media feed told you you’ll get “liked” for. But what you–the real you–feels natural in. That’s the path to more peace of mind.
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very best part about ageing is the gain of wisdom and experience that allows us to see through all of that salesmanship. There will certainly be innocents who will find something like this unacceptable or even funny. But if they’re lucky enough to live long enough, they too will come to recognize the short-sightedness of their vision: