I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
I’ve been wondering lately what it might look like if I set down my ambitions. What if I lived in joy and creativity without thinking about where it all might end up? What if I didn’t keep saying, to myself and here on this blog, I’m going to do X.
I would still work on my story+writing project Things Men Gave Me. I would still go skiing. I would still maintain my house. I would still keep up with friends and family.
I might be happier.
What are my ambitions? It feels a little weird to share them here, but I’ll do it anyway.
- To see my eventual full memoir become a bestseller
- To sell my paintings that go with the memoir for thousands of dollars
- To be interviewed on podcasts and even television about my book and art
- And, of course, to make a lot of money in the process
The goal is, of course, to be able to consume more, and also to have external recognition of my brilliance.
Actually I don’t necessarily want to consume more, I just want to keep up my modern high consumption American lifestyle.
I sense in my own life and maybe that of other people’s a new flavor or fragrance in the wind: a wish to live more simply and frugally, a desire to get off social media entirely, an urge to give up the activities I’ve been doing just in case they pay off with a job or important networking contacts for the future.
I already did dispense with the idea and reality of working a corporate job.
And now I’m thinking of setting down ambition entirely.
I’ve been an enthusiastic participant in consumer culture in my life.
This past week, I started shopping for a new pair of shoes. My mom gave me a pair of Skechers GO WALK Flex – Grand Entry slip-ins. I wear them every day. I love them. They are so comfortable and easy to put on. I decided I wanted another pair, a pair in a different color, maybe black or purple or olive? But there was nothing wrong with the first pair.
I remember one time in my old house my daughter Briar was cleaning out her closet. She exclaimed delightedly, “My Uggs!” and then as she continued, “My other Uggs!” We laughed so hard when she said that.
We are so immersed in consumer culture. It seems natural to just keep buying, even when we have all we need, and more. It’s only in a culture of affluence where you would think it’s ok to buy another pair of shoes just because you want a different style or color than the perfectly good ones you have.
Philosopher Kate Soper questions the culture of affluence in The Limits of the Growth Economy:
Our so-called “good life” is, after all, a major cause of stress and ill health. It is noisy, polluting, and wasteful. Its work routines and commercial priorities have forced people to plan their whole lives around job-seeking and career. Many are condemned to unfulfilling and precarious work lives in the gig economy. Even those with more secure employment will frequently begin their days in traffic jams or suffering other forms of commuter discomfort, and then spend much of the rest of them glued to a screen engaged in mind-numbing tasks. A good part of their productive activity is designed to lock time into the creation of a material culture of fast fashion, continuous home improvement, urban sprawl, speedier production, and built-in obsolescence.
Our consumption economy’s markets profit hugely from selling back to us the goods and services we have too little time or space to provide for ourselves. Consider the role of the fast food, leisure, and therapy industries, or the gyms where people pay to walk on a treadmill because walking anywhere else is impossible or unpleasant. These markets’ merchandising strategies promote competitive forms of consumption, especially among the young, often relying on devious means such as body-shaming, thus worsening anxiety and depression. These markets also now subject all online shoppers to the insidious advertising strategies of what has been called “surveillance capitalism,” while at the same time off-loading onto the consumer much of the servicing and bureaucracy that businesses used to perform themselves.
She questions it in the context of concern for the environment, but I want to question it all by itself.1
Is the good life really achieved by earning more money, spending it, and, in the process, achieving minor or major recognition from other people?
Social media encourages and reinforces a consumption and achievement culture.
I saw these interesting research results on Twitter yesterday:
Over 35,000 people were paid to deactivate either Instagram or Facebook for six weeks, right before the 2020 presidential election. Participants showed measurable improvements in happiness, anxiety, and depression. Researchers also found that quitting Facebook was 15% as effective as therapy, and quitting Instagram 22% as effective.
Social media like Instagram and Facebook make people feel worse about themselves, because they compare their own actual lives to the curated ones they see online. They include ads or organic content that pushes consumption of unnecessary goods and services.
You’re never good enough when you compare yourself to what you see on social media. You never have enough, either.
In my case, being on social media creates ambition for a kind of creator success and achievement that I don’t necessarily need or want to pursue.
Nineteenth century continental philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said that striving for things and then achieving satisfaction only creates more striving.
In The World as Will and Representation he writes:
All striving springs from want, from deficiency, from dissatisfaction with one’s condition; it is therefore suffering so long as it is not satisfied. But no satisfaction is lasting: it is always merely the starting point of a new striving. We see the whole course of a man’s life to be in this sense a continual oscillation between desire and satisfaction, and hence between suffering and boredom.
I have found this in my practice of art. My art was accepted into multiple juried shows during 2025. I sold a piece and I won an award for another. Is that enough? Not at all! I want to show more, sell more, have an online store, sell my work at festivals, have people talk about my success and how great my art is.
In his 2015 book The Burnout Society, the South Korean Berlin-based philosopher Byung-Chul Han suggests that modern society is gripped by an imperative to achieve, resulting in mass burnout and depression.
We have become an achievement society rather than a disciplinary society, he writes:
Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society [Leistungsgesellschaft]. Also, its inhabits are no longer “obedience-subjects” but “achievement-subjects.” They are entrepreneurs of themselves. [emphasis mine]
The achievement society encourages us to belong only to ourselves, to fully become ourselves, and to achieve at our highest capacity or potential. This leads to depression, says Han.
Much more to say about Han’s philosophy on the achievement society and the achievement subhject—I will take it up in future posts.
- Not that I don’t care about the environment. It’s just that consumption capitalism is bad even without the deleterious environmental effects. ↩︎