The evil genius of marketing, I find, is its ability to make us adopt problems we don’t have.
As a perfectionist in recovery, I often fall prey to that. I was recently researching note-taking methods, when, before I knew it, I was reading about the PARA filing framework, worrying about my productivity and knowledge management systems, wondering if I needed software for creating a second brain, and re-evaluating my whole digital life. My quest for one solution had quickly generated ten new problems I hadn’t known I had.
But, it’s our pathological problem-solving that is the ultimate problem.
We portion reality into problems and solutions. Problems make us feel bad, solutions make us feel good. When we have a problem, we beat ourselves down. When we find a solution, well—some beat themselves down a little less, others perhaps afford themselves some satisfaction, depending on the person’s degree of underlying self-judgement.
Our brains are hard-wired for feedback loops. Anything we do, the brain is assessing and telling us how well we’re doing it. And that’s a very useful function, in many situations. It serves us in learning new skills, putting on jeans rather than pyjamas to go to the bank—in short, having a healthy amount of self-awareness.
But it’s also a function that works against us—and one that marketeers exploit to gives us more and more problems. More things to buy, learn, accomplish, be before we can finally be happy with who we are.
The perpetual dissatisfaction with who we are is a silent epidemic.
People are exhausted, depressed, hopeless because they’re trying harder and harder to get there but instead getting farther and farther from it. And that’s not a coincidence.
The harder we hustle the more we widen the gap between where we are and where we want to be. And the deeper we fall into that gap.
The abyss of that gap is called insidious self-judgement.
Insidious self-judgement is like fire. The more we feed it by trying to fix ourselves the more out of control it gets.
The best antidote I’ve found to that is the self-acceptance that’s on the other side of unravelling the thought patterns that give rise to our dissatisfaction and self-judgement.