The More Myth
To the average Westerner, old values such as propriety and simplicity are foreign concepts or antiquated ideals. We've been conditioned by the media to believe that more is better. Bigger cars, bigger houses, bigger salaries, bigger vacations, even bigger portions at the drive-through are supposed to guarantee us more happiness. Does having more than the average Joe really multiply our share of peace and joy?
An interesting study by Nobel psychologist Daniel Kahneman, together with economist Angus Deaton, has written that in the U.S., happiness levels off at incomes of around $75,000 a year. So while a certain amount of happiness can be "bought," once our needs are met, you can't get any happier just because you have more money. Let's look closer at the "more is better" myth, and how to extricate ourselves from the unnecessary clutches of materialism.
Love can't be bought. Peace is priceless. We've all heard these platitudes, and most of us realize there's at least some truth to them, because we've known people (our fell into the trap ourselves) of the disgruntled materialist. You know the kind of person I'm talking about-having it all but never satisfied. Having spent the last 11 years of my life as a mental healthcare professional, I've interviewed thousands of clients who have shared with me their deepest fears and darkest problems, and in that time, not once in 11 years did a client ever tell me that what hurt them the most, or was most important to them had anything remotely to do with money. But what about people who are unemployed, you may be thinking...aren't the unemployed less happy? Yes, unemployment is a textbook recipe for depression and stress, and most definitely impacts everyone touched by it in a negative way. The interesting thing about unemployment, however, is why it causes so much unhappiness. When clients talk to me about being unemployed, strangely enough, lack of funds isn't their primary concern. They are more concerned about how it makes them feel: unproductive, undervalued, unacknowledged, and worst of all, dependent upon others. It's what unemployment does to our self-esteem and self-worth that is most devastating. So while being able to provide for our own needs is a necessary ingredient for happiness, what seems to be at the heart of an unemployed person's unhappiness is feeling bad about themselves. I've come to the conclusion that money alone is not the key to happiness.
Clients come to my office to solve problems. The problems they need to solve always fit into two broad categories: problems with themselves, and problems with others. Common problems with ourselves include: addiction (such as smoking and drinking), mental health issues (like anxiety, depression or grief), phobias or fears (driving, flying, or public speaking), as well as career concerns. Common problems with others include: relational difficulties such as issues with children, partners or extended family, and infidelity. It's worth noting that whether the problem is with ourselves or with others, the greatest "unhappiness factors" are always relational. Yet we're told by the media that if we owned more, took more vacations, and fit the societal stereotype of rich and thin, we'd be deliriously happy people. That's not what research shows, and it's been my professional experience that while less is not more, more does not equal happiness.
The Pinnacle of Human Development
A famous psychologist named Abraham Maslow figured out that once our basic needs for survival and safety are met, next we want stability. Stability is another word for security. A little money in the bank for emergencies, healthcare coverage, a retirement fund, and a stable relationship-for most people these factors define security. But what Maslow discovered is that once we are surviving and secure (that 75,000 mark), we begin yearning for immaterial things such as love, acceptance, and belonging. When we feel loved, accepted and as if we belong, we might feel as if we have achieved a measure of success: to do what you love, and loving the people who do life with you. Still beyond this level lies the mountaintop, the pinnacle of human development, which is self-actualization. You've heard that important-sounding word before. Boiled down it means: actualizing your unique potential. In order to actualize our potentials we have to discover ourselves. Discover ourselves? This might sound at first like a lot of spiritual mumbo jumbo. But the recipe for becoming all we can be includes: self-reflection, self-discovery, self-exploration, self-realization, and self-expression. It was Socrates who first advised, "Know thyself." Maslow firmly believed that most people will never attain the ultimate goal of life's journey-to know thyself. It was author Stephen Covey who pointed out that the reason it's important to achieve the goal of self-realization is that if we do, we will feel we have accomplished something significant, something meaningful with our lives. And isn't that what we all really want? I believe Maslow was right-most of us won't get to stand on the mountaintop because most of us are too preoccupied with the attainment of success to notice the highest prize actually lies beyond it.
Maslow All Messed-Up
I don't mean to throw a monkey-wrench into Maslow's hallowed and famed format, but I'm going to anyway. While his formula has stood the academic test of time, what he didn't discuss was the attainment of inner peace despite bad circumstances. Ask psychiatrist and Nazi concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl, author of, "Man's Search for Meaning" about happiness. He would tell you that while he was tortured by the Nazis as a prisoner of war he found that happiness was more a state of mind, more a determination of will than pleasant circumstances. Dr. Frankl determined that the most hopeless of prisoners, the ones who eventually "ran for the (electric) fence" were those who had little or no spirituality, and therefore little hope for a better next life. He saw that the more spiritual a person was, the happier, more hopeful and positive they seemed to be in the midst of dire circumstances: "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing-the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." People who were spiritually-oriented found a purpose and meaning in their suffering, and it infused them with an unexplained strength to carry on in the most uninhabitable of environments. Frankl's findings seem to indicate that in times of severe deprivation, hope can still be found, and it comes from within. As Frankl explains it, "When we can no longer change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."
All You Need Is Love
You might be familiar with the Beattle's classic, "All You Need s Love." But is it true? If I have love and nothing but love, can love alone make me happy? Again I defer to the wisdom of Dr. Frankl: "A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved." It was Frankl's experience that a person can transcend unhappiness if they have something, or someone to love. His conclusion agrees with research which shows that the #1 fundamental need of all humans everywhere is the need to feel loved. This need is seen clearly when abandoned and orphaned children develop a condition known as "failure to thrive." By definition, failure to thrive is when the efforts of a living being to continue life ultimately cease. Children who lack sufficient amounts of nurturing touch and love within the early months and years of their lives steadily deplete both mentally and physically, and ultimately die. While Maslow articulated human needs quite adeptly, the order in which he presented them may have been miscalculated. Love is the fundamental human motivation for living, not money. Even when our physical needs are met, if we don't feel loved, the will to live grows dim. While the "more money equals more happiness" equation doesn't add up, we are then left to ponder, wonder, and scratch our heads about this business of spirituality and self-actualization, especially when we've been programmed to believe the slogan, "He who dies with the most toys, wins." To become the happiest we can possibly be, ancient spiritual wisdom keeps pointing back to one place: right back at me.
But I Know Me!
Recently a client was vehemently objecting to the thought of getting to know himself. I had to chuckle because his defense was, "But I know me!" I thought he said very well the quandary we are in when we think about spending time with ourselves in quiet meditation or reflection. There's nothing to distract us from our problems. We're not being entertained, we're not judging anything or giving our opinion, we're not DO-ing anything...which is why it's less than comfortable for us to spend a lot of time with ourselves. Self-reflection, self-discovery, self-exploration, and self-realization all begin with one word: the self. This is because before an outer change occurs, and inner change must occur. We must confront our demons if we are ever going to overcome them. We must be willing to sit with our pain in order for our hearts to stop hurting. Jung said, "Whatever we resist, persists." And while we think we know ourselves pretty well, the truth is, we may only be in touch with a collection of negative and outdated unconscious beliefs about ourselves that have been running the show as if we were on autopilot. If you haven't figured it out yet, your thoughts are not YOU. Your thoughts are just the brain's unending stream of commentary. I think of the brain like a newscaster. It thinks its job is to broadcast every bad, scary and negative story it can make up (kind of like the real news). It doesn't do this because it's intentionally trying to drive you crazy, but because one of its primary directives is to keep you from harm. It's always scanning your environment for the possibility of a threat: "Don't get too close to that person, don't look weak, don't be taken advantage of, don't be too generous, don't, don't, don't." Your brain is just doing its job of protecting you. This is why when you ask it to take a back seat during meditation it may object, because you're not allowing it to broadcast. And if you've ever tried to meditate you know that even though you want it to simmer down and be quiet, it's like a fidgety kid whose been asked to fold its hands and sit still. That kid's just got to wiggle! First his fingers start to play and then his knees start to bounce because every fiber of his being sees no sense in sitting still! Not fun for the kid, and not much fun for the parent, either. And this is just what it's like when we begin to train the mind. But the more self-reflection we do, the clearer we see, and the more insight we get.
Get Real
Rather than being in touch with our spiritual selves we may have a stronger relationship built with our broadcaster brain. After all, that brain of yours IS pretty amazing! It will keep you entertained forever if you let it, kind of like leaving on the 24-hour news on after dinner. But what if the station never changed? What if you were caught in some crazy, weird vortex (like the Twilight Zone), where every time you turned on the TV it was the same evening news? There was a movie called Groundhog Day in which a guy gets stuck in one day for the rest of his life. Your brain is like that. It would be happy if you never changed the channel, stuck watching the same old broadcast for the rest of your life. Like being trapped in a virtual world that exists inside your own heads, we walk around trapped within its broadcast as if we had headphones on, shutting out reality. The Buddhist spiritual teacher Adyashanti said, "Our whole idea of ourselves is just that-just an idea. It may not even be reality." He meant that our self-concept may not be accurate. It may only be our mind's stagnant version of the truth about us, and the world. The problem with stagnation is if we never change the channel in our heads, meaning: if we always see things the same way, our problems will never change, and the solutions to our problems will never occur to us, because we are approaching the problems the same way we approached them before. However, if we allow perceptions to change (changing the channel), not only does the eager-to-broadcast mind have something new to broadcast, but our perspectives will have changed enough so that the old problems which seemed impossible to solve can be approached differently, seen from another angle. When I say differently, I mean seeing our problems from the vantage point of our Higher Self, and that channel is a distinctly different channel.
To see all of Nina's books: http://www.amazon.com/Nina-Bingham/e/B008XEX2Z0
To see all of Nina's books: http://www.amazon.com/Nina-Bingham/e/B008XEX2Z0