Resolutions and the Hungry Ghost Podcast Transcript

Resolutions and The Hungry Ghost

This is the transcript first of a three part podcast of a series on Resolutions, Intentions, and serious behavior change. There are some edits (not enough, I fea).

Lead in

I have a jaded relationship with resolutions, which I guess means I have a jaded relationship with January, [chuckles] and upcoming to January every year. It’s because of the idea of resolutions, like this is something we’re supposed to do, that we have to do. In my opinion, there’s a number of approaches to making changes, and resolutions is certainly one of the very biggest. And in my sense, it’s almost equivalent to attempting to thrust change down our throats and then wishing we had a stomach pump. [chuckles] Three weeks in, and many of us have already abandoned our resolutions, our goals, our efforts to reduce our food intake, or whatever it is. Another common approach to making changes is intentions, and I think this is like a version of mindfulness. Uh, it’s like resolutions with wrapping paper, [chuckles] so you’re supposed to feel so much better about it. And then there’s what I’ve come up with in a lot of cases, and that’s I just give up and don’t care. Well, frankly, I’m not sure that’s the best answer either. I’m not happy with any of them. And so for this episode and two others following, we’re gonna be talking about how do we make sense of personal change? How do we look ourselves in the mirror in the morning and the evening, and feel at peace a little bit with who we are and what we’re trying to do with our lives? How do we kind of live in a world of better alignment? And this episode is called The Hungry Ghost: Why Resolution Brain Fails Us. Hi, I’m Mike Davis, and you’re listening to Worldwide Stew. If you scratch beneath the surface of life, there’s always a simmering pot of big personal ideas and stories, and that’s how we got from there to here. And if we look hard enough, we discover timeless truths that help us flourish. Worldwide Stew surfaces stories about people, places, things, and universal concepts that connect us all. You might be surprised by how much we all share. Welcome to Worldwide Stew. I’m your host, Mike Davis. I think all of us want to feel like we can succeed, like we have a purpose for living, that we are not broken, that, yes, we can establish goals and make our way through them and feel confident about making a difference in our lives. But it seems that this metaphor of making resolutions, it’s a timeworn tradition marking the transition to the beginning of a new year. And usually, in these cases, we focus on our deficits, the things where we feel like failures, and then we create a laundry list of needed changes. And, and the thing is, and this is so disturbing and unethical from my point of view, and I mean unethical, if we listen to advertisers, our deficits almost literally turn into a shopping list. Who we are wasn’t good enough, so voila, we’ve bought a laundry list of things or apps that we’ve been told will help us one hundred percent to feel better about ourselves. And when these– when we see the ads on television, everybody’s dancing and running around and smiling and obviously having the time of our lives, or when we go to Facebook, we hear about the incredible accomplishments of people we admire. [sighs] So we climb onto the sideshow of resolutions, and off we go, and within a very short period of time, usually, resolutions fall by the wayside. I gave up on resolutions years ago. Building resolutions based on my failings always led to an even greater sense of failure. And something that’s really important in this is that my sense that my failings was built on my experience as a child, as a society, living within a society that had certain expectations of weight, height, happiness, all of these kinds of things. So I build my, uh, list of resolution, my laundry list, on, on these kinds of things…. and that’s a really important, and I hope you’ll kind of keep that in mind, ‘cause that’s gonna become important. So I discover– I was like: Why do this to myself? Why would I, why would I increase the sense of pain that I have, knowing that my resolutions have more than a small chance of failing? And in case you think you’re better than me in this respect, many studies suggest that resolution brain, as I’m gonna call it, often leads to less confidence and more depression. So why did I do that to myself? I concluded, “Why even mess with this?” So I want you, I hope, I invite you, please, to stay with me for just a moment. \

The Hungry Ghost

It’s important that we listen to many different kinds of traditions, and I think one of the great traditions in understanding resolutions and why we fail resolutions comes from Buddhism. And Buddhism has this really pointed metaphor, and it’s really related to the title of this episode. And in this metaphor, it’s about suffering that attends our modern state of “not enough.” We can’t have enough, and whether that’s about our insatiable need for more or our pursuit of feeling better about ourselves, we can’t get enough. And I love the work of Buddhist author Jack Kornfield. He talks eloquently about the metaphor of the hungry ghost, and I, I’m quoting here:

Wanting is characterized as a hungry ghost, a ghost with an enormous belly and a tiny pinhole mouth, who can never eat enough to satisfy his endless need. And when this demon or difficulty arises, simply naming it as wanting or grasping and beginning to study its power in your life, that can be a really helpful thing.

And so getting back to what we’re talking about, are we really helping ourselves by making our starting point, our fixations, our status, our addictions, and/or our deficits? Aren’t there better starting options that don’t increase our suffering? Now, maybe you’ve been really successful with your resolutions in the past, and the studies indicate that there are people who seem to do okay, somewhere around maybe fifty percent in the studies that I’ve read, and I have read them. Um, you could see them on my public Zotero library that’s publicly available. I will put a link to that in Worldwide Stew, the episode notes. But really, this deficit financing kind of establishment of our resolutions often leads to more suffering, and it’s based on things that, perhaps if we stop to think about it, really don’t reflect what we really need in our souls, what, what our lives tell us about ourselves, what our purpose is, and things like that. And so, uh, let’s go back to the resolution brain, and it fixates on our failures, our deficits, and our, our deficits and our weaknesses. It promotes suffering by triggering a loss of hope and depression when our resolutions fail you. And honestly, starting, you know, in the next few weeks, those who’ve made resolutions, they’re just gonna fall by the wayside. And this promotes suffering by triggering loss of hope and agency, um, a feeling like, “I don’t– I can’t make decisions that are meaningful and important and make a difference.” That’s going to be really present when we see our resolutions kind of diminish in their success. And then failed resolutions highlights our sense of “not enough.” We don’t have enough, we aren’t enough, and this incites the hungry ghost of wanting more. So, for instance, imagine that, uh, I’m trying to lose weight or something, and I look at what is needed, and on the laundry list that’s needed, I need a new scale. So I go out and buy a new scale, and it has to have all the attachments and everything. Everything. So… And discover that that increases yet another sense of failure in my life, things related to finances.

The Resolution Industry

So I wanna highlight a few of the more insidious ways that resolution brain betrays us, and that is-… The resolution industry is manufactured. The self-improvement industry is active all year long. We aren’t good enough, and in some way, our eating or our smell, I mean, the– there has been an increasing amount of ads for various kinds of deodorants. Um, our exercise is not enough. We don’t have enough possessions. Uh, our clothing isn’t up to par. It’s not the latest. We’re constantly told that we’re not enough. I’ve been particularly troubled by appeals to young people who are automatically inclined toward self-comparison anyway. You know, they, they are trying to see where they belong in life. The targeting of young people is especially troubling to me. There is no low– these– there seems no low to which the industry will not go to project shame and fear of rejection on young people. So now they are spending so much time advertising, uh, intimate deodorants, highlighting concerns over body odor, and those sorts of things. And in some ways, people begin entirely new addictions to environmentally invasive products. Now, these products have been with us for a long time, but the focus on them for young people, it suggests that things associated with the body that really are a natural part of our human existence, that those things, well, we’re failures in them. I also want to mention that the fact that the New Year’s timing for so many of these resolution industry, resolution brain marketing, uh, campaigns is especially galling. It uses our inadequacies to promote sales on the New Year’s transition. And finally, many sellers hypocritically tell us that we’re all beautiful, and immediately turn around and suggest other areas of inadequacy. And so ultimately, the resolution industry creates false urgency and crisis. They tell us this with the specific intent of inciting fight or flight thinking. That sort of thinking directly increases their bottom line. So coming back, there are three core kinds of failures. There’s fixation on… With, with the resolution brain syndrome, which I’m just calling it. That’s not a scientific name for resolution brain. That’s just me.

Three core failures of the hyping I’ve called resolution brain

Uh, there are three core failures of resolution brain. It’s a fixation on our deficits. It can often trigger depression because it reminds us when we do fail, that we’re not enough, which leads to the third thing, third experience, the third failure, and that is the feeling that we’re not enough and that cycle of feeling, that continuing being not enough. And this leads us to kind of the addiction framework, uh, sort of addiction framework, and this is shame. You know, we experience some kind of shame, some kind of not enoughness, that we’re not good enough, that we can do something to help our gaps, our deficits. And so we go out and make a purchase, and then we make some brief effort. But honestly, I don’t know if you remember when you were a child, and, uh, if if you– if they still play board games anymore, but when you were playing a board game, you had to read through all the rules, and, or at least to make sense of the game, you had to kind of read through the rules. And the reality is that for most of us caught in this addiction framework, that brief effort is kind of like reading the rules. It’s, it’s just getting to the place where you’re actually starting is hard enough, and then you do this brief effort, this attempt to do these things, but certain things get in your way, and you have to change your schedule. You have to adjust things. You have to go pick up the kids from school. All of these things lead to failure…. and this only increases shame. So this addiction framework is related to shame. Go purchase, do something to fix it. Get a new scale, get a new piece of exercise equipment. Then you put in more effort. You do something, you read the instructions, you get the thing assembled, put together, and then you try to figure out how it works. It’s like, uh, VCRs, how they used to be, if you remember VCRs. And then you really don’t do it often enough because, well, life intervenes, and so there’s failure and more shame. That’s the addiction framework. So the big question today, and the question for the next episode, is: Aren’t there better starting options that don’t increase our suffering? Aren’t there better places to begin change, to alter our experiences with change, to pump up our sense of agency, to build success momentum? Aren’t there better places to do that than a sense of failure and deficits?

Better places to focus for change

That’s the question for next time. So between now and the next episode, I guess I find myself hoping that you’ll let go of what doesn’t seem to be true for you, and maybe figuring out– spending a little bit of time figuring out who you are. And maybe that’s the parting shot, as it were, for today’s episode, is try to avoid the “not enough,” the stories of your deficits, the stories of your failures. Try to avoid them. Try to avoid the sense of otherness. I guess that’s what I’m wishing for you as I record this. I’m trying to see you driving on the other end as you’re listening, maybe driving to work, um, maybe listening while you’re doing tasks at home. You matter to me, and I hope this matters to you. It’s the best attempt I can make, I think, to say that I care about you if you’re listening. You can support me if you would like on some other places, and that’ll be on my website. [sighs] Be kind and gentle to yourself. I’m wishing for you to see the good that is part of who you are. Thanks so much for listening. This has been Mike Davis, and I’ll be back soon with better places to begin change. [gentle music] They may be a little bit slower change, but they’ll be change that you can do and not feel bad about. Hi, this is Mike. Thanks so much for listening. We hope this has been beneficial for you. This is a production of worldwidestew.com, and you can get more information at that website, worldwidestew, S-T-E-W, .com. The music was provided by AG Soundtracks. Our appreciation to them. Sound editing by Mike Davis, yours truly. We hope you’ll join us soon. Bye now. [music]

Disclosure of amount of AI use

Mike Davis (80%); AI (20%). I think.

The content here reflects core ideas by Mike Davis who collaborated with Claude.ai to check facts and hopefully make this less boring for the listener and reader.