Being positive, ambitious, dynamic and overflowing with projects and objectives: such is the promise of contemporary happiness according to the new ideology of personal development. Finding the resources within ourselves to face life and overcome all its handicaps, using motivational techniques and abstract projections: is happiness hiding behind the omni-motivated façade of an anxious-depressive society with its injunctions to become the archetype of one's own happiness? Nothing less !
We are the first society to consider the individual as the center of the world and of all attention. This entity would embody a unique mystery to be revealed at all costs. The consumer society and the marketing of needs are strongly responsible for the representation of the "unique individual". We take for granted that it is up to us to become the architect of our own accomplishment. Whether on a professional or relational level, everything seems to to be manageable by being positive. We used to think of happiness as a phenomenon dependent on the exterior: religions, destiny, etc. Today it is considered a choice, and it is up to us to decide. We would therefore choose to be happy or unhappy. Really ?
For this, we are offered all kinds of techniques to boost our mind and our testosterone. Not a place where the dicta of "become what you want to be and choose your destiny" is not hammered home like so much evidence and common sense. Libraries are filled with "best sellers" dealing with well-being and personal development.
The new ideology of optimism is in full swing, and the business of happiness is cashing in.
Each one competes in marketing ingenuity to offer methods that are each more unique than the next. According to these new gurus of contemporary fulfillment, happiness is immediately possible if we are gullible enough to entrust our life and our wallet to them. It would therefore be a question of paying to discover that it is enough just to be positive in order to attract the positive.
There is coaching for all aspects of your life: love, sex, make-up, fitness, professional, sports performance, etc. You would have to be fooled to think that this type of support leads to happiness and fulfillment. When we observe our contemporaries, the individual has never been so alone and internally isolated. All the commercial proposals that try to flirt with him are only there to fill the void but the loneliness. We talk about using your deep personality, learning to love yourself, to forgive yourself, to smile at life so that it smiles back at you, etc. All these hollow formulas are so many mantras supposed to give direction and a meaning to a life that no longer has any.
The religion of the self is born, and it is now a question of developing your cognitive business.
When we take the time to dissect the offers and the methods proposed, the vast majority of the works is mediocre and without much interest. The subjects treated and the psychological mechanisms at work are identical: to be confident in 5 sessions, to be rich in 6 sessions, etc. A well-Americanized narrative for an assured objective of Eldorado and the promised land. No need to store diplomas to ensure a bright future. Make way for emotional recycling. It is by hitting bottom, then deciding to be happy that we find the springs of the recipe for happiness. We would then feel the legitimacy of evangelizing the rest of humanity. Rub shoulders with the devil to then be god oneself in short.
There has never been a more narcissistic time than the one we live in now. The great decline of Western society opens up before us. Adapting the individual to a sick world is the new proposition we must revere. Otherwise, the ambient conformism will drive you out of the heard, to preserve its own decrepitude.
The fact is that the individual gives far too much importance to what he is, to his neurotic being. He has de facto isolated himself from the rest of humanity. There is no longer a border between "normality" and "neurosis". The world now embodies the modern spirit of the decomposition of the critical mind, in favor of a culture of appearance, image and more generally of intellectual nothingness. Lobotomization is deep in the air. Its nauseating scent covers everything.
He may refine his plastic smile, whiten his teeth and work on his influence on social networks, everything suggests that he is alone and without any real connections to anything. His relationship status is near nothingness. As far as work is concerned, it is the great disenchantment and silent resignation. Individual support and stress management in the workplace is a flourishing consulting activity. Adapting the individual to the company using all kinds of methods more unique than the others. Making him more productive and more docile to the injunctions to be a profit center and a profitable entity, a marketer experienced in launching innovations that are not, seems to be the consulting profession that has the wind aft. But making an individual adapt to the corporate religion of "all together for a better world" does not make a person a fulfilled subject. In the absence of an existence of our own, we conform to a model in which we do not believe, in an attempt to give meaning to an existence that no longer has any. Because working for the grandiose world collapse generates all kinds of contradictions. We keep the illusion going for a few years until burnout, then we decide to change our lives.
Health and fulfillment are not due to professional adaptation. Living a fulfilling existence, in which order and virtue reign, free from conflicts and fears, cannot be reduced to the traditional pattern of professional success. We need to take a step back and have a global view of our existence. We need to understand that the self-centered and narcissistic nature of the individual can only produce disorder. The fact of considering oneself a unique center which must tend towards an archetype of happiness is of a contradictory nature, for wanting to be what one is not engenders a tyranny of becoming.
There is nothing to become, because that implies a headlong rush. The fact is that the individual is depressed. All his old patterns are crumbling. Paradigm shifts in society have generated deep anxiety related to tomorrow and chronic emotional insecurity due to its isolation, which now fills all available space. Everyday life is full of tension and unease. We dream of somewhere else, but in the meantime the boat is taking on water and it is only a matter of time before it hits the bottom. He no longer knows who to rely on and no longer has any confidence in himself. All its former authorities have failed: politics, religion, education, science etc. No promise of improvement in sight. He no longer knows which saint to devote himself to. Normalized depression is the new western normality. The problem lies in the concept of free will and the freedom to choose. The consumer society gave birth to individualism. It is the latter who, from his confused being, poses the question of choice. When you know where you are going, there is nothing to choose. You take the path that takes you there and that's it. It is only when in doubt that the choice arises: left or right. But if I turn to the right, I may be making a mistake… Confusion is therefore the product of indecision and uncertainty. It is only by understanding what disorder is that one can find order in one's life. Then right action imposes itself, without the need to exercise choice. So, there is nothing to become, we embody what we are, and the contradictions disappear. More tension, more conflict, more depression.
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