Chapters 8 and 19, the disconnection to, and reconnection to, meaningful values.
It's hard to imagine people talking about "meaningful values" nowadays without someone trying to sell you Jesus, and that's why I thought the title was weird when I began to read chapter 8. But, the chapters don't have to do with religion, but the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motives.
An intrinsic motive is something you do because you want to do it. You think it'll make you a better person. You learn to play an instrument. You learn how to be a better friend. You lift weights.
An extrinsic motive is something you don't want to do,, but you do to get something. You want money, recognition, sex, superior status, etc.
So we all have intrinsic and extrinsic goals. Studies have been done on the subject on extrinsic goals and happiness, and everyone of them says the same thing: Those that achieve extrinsic goals don't become more happy. If anything, they become more depressed.
For many people, the extrinsic goals is a manifestation of materialism. People who work to get the big house, the nice car, the fancy jewelry, they find themselves feeling depressed and anxious and they don't know why.
I thought of my dad when I was reading about this. My dad has plenty of money, and he spends it. Before he retired, he would take lavish vacations to Mexico with his wife every year. After he retired, he bought a luxurious motor home and they take cross-country road trips every year. Him and his wife have very expensive luxury cars. They live in a McMansion in a very well-off town. He also goes balls-to-the-wall every Christmas (as an example, my wife and I asked for a television for our bedroom and he bought us a 60-inch smart t.v.). My dad has spent his life chasing money and spent plenty to prove that he has it. If you wanted to envy someone with cash, he'd be it.
He also has a medicine cabinet full of antidepressants. He also never learned how to be a good dad or a good friend. He never really learned to be good with people at all. His "friends" were always his work subordinates, and after he retired, they retired him. And it pretty much goes without saying that his kids don't spend much time with him. When I do see him now that he's no longer working, he's lonely and miserable.
And then I thought of myself as a kid as I read more into the chapters. A lot of the chapters do focus on kids, as they make it a point to show how advertising warps our minds at an early age. A famous experiment they mentioned was one where they had two groups of toddlers. One group watched two commercials for toys. The second group wasn't given any ads at all. Then both the groups were told, "You're going to go play in a sandbox, and there's going to be two kids there. The first is a nice boy that doesn't have any toys. The second is a mean boy that has a toy truck. Which one do you want to play with?" The kids that saw the commercial decided that playing with the mean boy was better than playing with the nice boy. The opposite was true for the kids that didn't watch a commercial. So we're taught from an early age that material goods=happiness.
Two parts of the chapters really struck a chord with me. One of the people that was interviewed for the chapter decided to take his family out to the country, disconnect from all forms of materialism, and have mostly lived a happy life. His son was made fun of for his shoes at school. His son was confused by this, asking them, "Why do you care?" I remembered being in fourth grade and made fun of for my clothes. I also wondered why they cared.
When I was in the seventh grade, I became a lot more demanding of my parents to get me nicer clothes and better things, because I was tired of being made fun of for having clothes bought at K-Mart and wearing off-brand shoes. My mom was a single mom at the time, and she did her best to accommodate me. I remember her willing to go halves on me on buying a pair of the Shaq Shoes. Ah yes, The Shaq Shoes. The shoes to have if you were a teenager living in 1994.
 |
| These cost $120 twenty-five years ago |
After I got both those things (thanks, mom), I got a few oohs and ahhs from my classmates, but after that, things went back to how they always were. And I didn't give a shit about either after a few weeks.
Fast forward to 2014. For the first time in my life, I have money to burn. I was working 70 hours a week and never seeing my firstborn or my wife, but I was paid. And I wanted to prove that I was paid. So I bought a camper and a brand new Jeep Cherokee. I didn't need either of these things. I already had a decent car that cost about $250 a month, but I wanted to show people that I had money, so I bought a car that cost another $200 a month, and a camper. Five years later and my car has 118,000 miles on it, I've had trouble making the payments (I was actually laid off from that job two months after buying both), and my wife and I miss tent camping. We always liked camping, just not in a trailer. Just like when I was a kid, there was a temporary high of getting the oohs and ahhs from people when I first bought them, but after a few weeks, I felt the same as before I bought them, except now I have an extra $400 a month in expenses.
When the wheels finally fall off of my Jeep, I'll probably just buy a Kia. They're ugly af, but they're at least affordable.
The chapters talk a lot about how advertising affects us and convinces us that buying stuff will make us happy. People that work in the advertisement industry have admitted for nearly a century that the goal of advertising is to make people feel inadequate without their product. Going back to the experiment above involving toddlers, it only took two commercials to convince them that the mean boy with the toy truck was better than the nice boy with no toys. We see way more than two commercials every day. We're told constantly that we're inadequate if we don't buy stuff. We have to work hard to defeat this mentality in ourselves, since we're bombarded with it several times a day.
Now don't get any of this twisted. I've already written extensively on financial distress and the toll it takes on mental health. There's a big difference between buying a big house because you think it'll make you happy and struggling to pay the rent. But we do need a reminder to be more focused on creating real human relationships and being better people than being focused on buying fancy shit.
It's one of the things that makes fitness so great for me. After I had bariatric surgery, I could have gone the route that many people take on their fitness journey and focus on the aesthetic-the extrinsic motivation. If I had gone that route, my fitness journey would have gone in an entirely different direction. I'd be hyper-focused on getting six pack abs, starving myself, and doing my best to make myself look good just to get the admiration of others. Instead, I decided to focus on meeting real fitness goals. I ran a half-marathon. I got started in power-lifting. Even now I'm on a diet not because I'm concerned with people calling me fat or whatever. I'm on it because I want to be healthy, and I don't want to go back to having diabetes and hypertension. I'm glad I chose the intrinsic path this time around. The extrinsic path would have resulted in demotivation, and ultimately, failure.
No comments:
Post a Comment