When industry focuses on human inadequacies

This post originated with the creation of a blog post on New Year’s Resolutions. I’m trying to keep my blog area focused on inspiration. So, instead of posting this in that area, I’m adding it to my website’s opinion section.

Yesterday, on my blog, I suggested some reasons that resolution brain lets us down:

• It fixates on our failures, deficits, and weaknesses
• It promotes suffering by triggering loss of hope and depression when resolutions fail
• It highlights our sense of not enough: we don’t have enough, we aren’t enough, and incites the Hungry Ghost of wanting more.

Today, I want to highlight a few of the more insidious ways that resolution brain can betray us.

• The Resolution Industry is manufactured. The self-improvement industry is active all year long. We aren’t good enough: in some way our eating, smell, possessions, exercise, and clothing, are inadequate. We are constantly told that we aren’t good enough.
• Business co-opt our shame, inadequacies, and fears of missing out to wedge us into making big changes at the New Year transition. We buy subscriptions, new clothing, exercise gear, and books hoping to find the secrets that will helpus change.
• While some advertisers tell us we’re all beautiful, they just as quickly, and hypocritically, turn around tell us something else we need to be complete.
• The Resolution Industry creates false urgency and crisis. They tell us this with the intent of inciting fight or flight thinking.

What to do in response to this psychological ghost lighting?

• Teach our children (and ourselves) to act from strength
• Shareholders should say, No, to companies using shame, ghost-lighting, and fight-or-flight triggering
• Use the least invasive methods to make the world safer, more pleasant, and comfortable.
• Adapt to our environment with gentleness. Everything in life exists on a spectrum of more or less pleasant. We should try to learn to accept life on life on it’s own terms. As a hospital chaplain, the body had a spectrum of smells; some were pleasant, some weren’t. You learned to adapt or work around the smells of the body (coffee grounds helped with the harder ones!). But, excellent providers never, ever, shamed people for their conditions. We shouldn’t shame ourselves, either.

So, just in time for New Years, that’s my rant on commercialism by the Resolution Industry with specific criticism directed at the hygiene industry.