Much of our waking life is spent in a desperate struggle to persuade others that we are not what we fear ourselves to be.
๐งต
๐งต
The tacit belief to which most of us subscribe is that the majority of people are by and large pretty well adjusted, contented, and lead conventionally well ordered lives.
But most people keep the way they feel about themselves as a deep and shameful secret.
But most people keep the way they feel about themselves as a deep and shameful secret.
Most people, most of the time, have a profound and unhappy awareness of the contrast between what they are and what they ought to be.
Even at a relatively superficial (but pervasive) level, for example, many people feel weak and silly when they ought to be strong and confident, ugly and insignificant when they should be attractive and striking.
As a consequence of this we spend enormous amounts of time and energy in guarding against others' getting a glimpse of our 'true', shameful selves by constructing what we feel will be acceptable public versions of ourselves, but which we know to be a hollow sham.
The aim that society sets us is to be something: to be recognized in at least some sphere, and if only by our immediate family and acquaintances, as successful or admirable or in some way to be reckoned with.
What you do matters not half as much as the aggrandizement which doing it brings you. The very word 'successful' perhaps most properly applied to actions is now more usually applied to people.
There are a few people who are happy if their activities are attended by success, but many more whose idea of happiness is to be seen as a 'successful person' no matter how dubious the route by which they achieve it.
Behind many 'symptoms' of anxiety lies an injury to the person's self-esteem, a despairing, inarticulate awareness that he or she has not lived up to the standards of adequacy which we are all complicit in setting.
The most obvious ideal, of course, is that, as well as successful, you should be strong, confident, attractive and powerful; the world is your oyster, and if you fail to find a comfortable place in it, there must be something the matter with you.
However banal it may seem, nothing holds up to us the nature of our aspirations better than advertisements. They confront us almost remorselessly with the ideals we cannot live up to.
The happy, loving family eating their cornflakes against views of waving wheatfields, eagerly waiting for the joys of the day to unfold
Slim, beautiful women whose smooth and unblemished limbs slide effortlessly into blue denim skins, later to catch the strong and approving gaze of confident young men who will cherish them with just the right amount of lust.
Unwrinkled middle-aged couples, with lovely children, whose new washing machine unites them in a love burning only just less brightly than on their wedding night.
People who know the ropes and fit into the world, handle others with easy assurance, get what they want without ruffling any feathers, live their lives in material ease, basking in the admiration and affection of those around them, but being tough if they have to be.
The triumphant progress of 'marketing' the colossal investment of intelligence, ingenuity and technical sophistication has put significant sections of a whole generation out of touch with the social and biological bases of reality.
A life conditioned by marketed ideals of 'success' can become so detached from subjective bodily desire that we simply find it impossible to say what we want.
Perhaps not everyone has quite lost sight of how far those ideals are really impossible of achievement. But there are many people who are cast into despair because of their failure to live up to them.
Although we should be confident, in control, likable... our actual experience of ourselves is quite otherwise. To get a clear view of the motives and intentions of our actions is almost inevitably to be assailed with anxiety because we are so unlike what we are supposed to be.
Emotional distress may not be an indication that something is wrong with us, but that there is something wrong with our world.
Loading suggestions...