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The rise of loneliness as a health hazard tracks with the entrenchment of values and practices that supersede any notion of “individual choices.” The dynamics include reduced social programs, less available “common” spaces such as public libraries, cuts in services for the vulnerable and the elderly, stress, poverty, and the inexorable monopolization of economic life that shreds local communities.
People no longer walk to their local establishment, where they meet and greet one another and familiar merchants they have known, but drive, each isolated in their car, to a windowless, aesthetically bereft warehouse, miles away from home. They might not even leave home at all—why bother, when you can order online?
“Research consistently shows,” he told me, “that the more people value materialistic aspirations as goals, the lower their happiness and life satisfaction and the fewer pleasant emotions they experience day to day. Depression, anxiety, and substance abuse also tend to be higher among people who value the aims encouraged by consumer society.
They will have also lower-quality interpersonal relationships. In turn, the more insecure people feel, the more they focus on material things. As materialism promises satisfaction but, instead, yields hollow dissatisfaction, it creates more craving. This massive and self-perpetuating addictive spiral is one of the mechanisms by which consumer society preserves itself by exploiting the very insecurities it generates.
Disconnection in all its guises—alienation, loneliness, loss of meaning, and dislocation—is becoming our culture’s most plentiful product. No wonder we are more addicted, chronically ill, and mentally disordered than ever before, enfeebled as we are by such malnourishment of mind, body, and soul.
Pleasure, Rob Lustig pointed out, is “This feels good. I want more.” Happiness, on the other hand, is “This feels good. I am contented. I am complete.”
According to another study presented to the American Heart Association, sugary drinks alone may be responsible for up to 180,000 deaths around the world.4 Coca-colonization, this has been called.
attendant lifestyle challenges endemic to our modern era: lack
of time, lack of exercise, growing insecurity, lack of family connection, loss of community, and erosion of the social network. There are many aspects of life that drive people to follow unhealthy diets and engage in self-harming habits, the main culprits being emotional pain, stress, and social dislocation.
There are many aspects of life that drive people to follow unhealthy diets and engage in self-harming habits, the main culprits being emotion...
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“It’s not what you are eating,” someone cleverly said, “it’s what’s eating you.”
In today’s America, narcissism and sociopathy are strategies. And they’re very successful strategies, especially in business and politics and entertainment.” Call it the myth of abnormal, this notion that somehow these antisocial traits go against the grain; truer to say they are the grain.
The harms of climate change include acute and chronic physical illness such as cardiovascular disease and susceptibility to infections, along with mental health challenges.
The abnormal has become the norm; the unnatural has become the inescapable.
“It’s not that they want you to die,” the endocrinologist Rob Lustig told me in a tone of mock reassurance. “They only want your money. They just don’t care if it kills you.”
Malcolm’s withering questions probe far beyond mental or emotional self-concept. Self-rejection has powerful physiological dimensions that pertain to every aspect of well-being. From an early age it is one of racism’s sharpest and most intimate harms.
“the soul of one’s being gets perpetually punctured … It’s when one’s definition of self is defined by someone else. It is when my sense of self is defined by what I am not, rather than by what I am.” He adds, “Who I am thus becomes a response to how I am defined; it’s always in response to something else.”3
The stain and the strain of being defined by outside prejudices could not but penetrate her core sense of who she was.
“If I don’t bring it up, I have all these physiological things inside.” Emotional suppression and its biological harms are, indeed, among the many wounds racism inflicts.
The suppression of individual authenticity plays havoc with biology, breeding illness; even greater mayhem will ensue for bodies belonging to groups whose self-suppression has been systemically imposed, often with great violence.
the triggering of inflammation-promoting genes, the premature aging of chromosomes and cells, tissue damage, elevation of blood sugar, the narrowing of airways.
Talk about emotions being traumatizing: What happens to a people that can’t show the full range of their emotions? For people of color raising children, the lens is not just ‘racism exists,’ but ‘racism can be life-threatening.’ Our childhood experience is one of learning how to live out of our survival defenses, and that just hasn’t changed.
The truth is, I talk a much better gender-equality game than I sometimes play.
We might ask ourselves what burdens, what stresses, could women of any color and class share with Black people as a group? To me the answer is clear: they are both especially targeted by a culture that does not honor but demeans, distorts, and even impels people to suppress who they are. If that is an accurate assessment, we would expect that as these pressures intersect and compound each other, so would the incidence of disease rise. And it does, hugely.5
In such a sexualized and threatening climate, how can many women avoid developing that “assaulted sense of self” Dr. Kenneth Hardy identified as one of the deep imprints of racism, along with the damage it does to physiological and psychological well-being?fn1
The burdens placed on women in patriarchal cultures, and the ways these curtail and constrain women’s prospects for authentic self-realization, have long been recognized—by women, that is.
The contemporary phrase emotional labor does a great job of conveying the joblike nature of this stress-inducing, externally imposed role. Arguably to an even greater degree than housework and childbirth, this is the proverbial “woman’s work” that “is never done.” Women often serve as the emotional glue—the connective tissue, if you like—that keeps nuclear and extended families and communities together.
Our society reinforces men’s sense of being entitled to women’s care in a way that almost escapes being put into words. I refer here to the automatic mothering women provide their male partners, the emotional sustenance that forms the invisible mortar of many heterosexual relationships: a very conventional dynamic that speaks to how tenacious gendered social constructs are, how thoroughly steeped we are in them.
Toxified masculinity, like the suppression of the feminine, is lethal. It claims its victims through many pathways, including alcoholism and other substance addictions, workaholism, violence, and suicidalityfn5—all defenses against or escapes from vulnerability, grief, and fear.
The mind cries out, explains, demonstrates, protests; but inside me a voice rises and shouts at it, “Be quiet, mind, let us hear the heart!”
It is a direction, not a destination; a line on a map, not a dot.
When we heal, we are engaged in recovering our lost parts of self, not trying to change or “better” them. As the depth psychologist and wilderness guide Bill Plotkinfn1 told me, the core question is “not so much looking at what’s wrong, but where is the person’s wholeness not fully realized or lived out?”
True healing simply means opening ourselves to the truth of our lives, past and present, as plainly and objectively as we can. We acknowledge where we were wounded and, as we are able, perform an honest audit of the impacts of those injuries as they have touched both our own lives and those of others around us.
Many of us will be ready to seek the truth only once we have concluded that the cost of not doing so is too high, or once we become sufficiently acquainted with our own ache of longing for the real.
In fact, our cerebral talents are all too readily recruited by the part of us that wants to deny how things are: there is a reason “rationality” and “rationalize” are linguistic siblings.
“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret,” the fox advises the Little Prince in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s beloved tale: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
In other words, the heart knows things, just as surely as a gut feeling is also a kind of knowing.
when I am conscious, to my personal path. With our minds we construct the world we live in: this is the core teaching. The contribution of modern psychology and neuroscience has been to show how, before our minds can create the world, the world creates our minds.
“Gabor, you don’t need to drag Auschwitz around with you everywhere you go.” In that instant Bessel saw me. Despite all my positive engagements with life, despite the love and joy and immense good fortune that have also been my portion, that self-directed hopelessness was an ever-lurking shadow, ready to obliterate the light whenever I experienced a setback or a discouragement, and even in innocent, unguarded moments.
In that instant Bessel saw me. Despite all my positive engagements with life, despite the love and joy and immense good fortune that have also been my portion, that self-directed hopelessness was an ever-lurking shadow, ready to obliterate the light whenever I experienced a setback or a discouragement, and even in innocent, unguarded moments.
You just need to allow yourself to be with it.”
None of us need be perfect, nor exercise saintly compassion, nor reach any emotional or spiritual benchmark before we can say we’re on the healing path. All we need is readiness to participate in whatever process wants to unfold within us so that healing can happen naturally. Anyone, no matter their history, can begin to hear wholeness beckoning, whether in a shout or whisper, and resolve to move in its direction. With the heart as a guide and the mind as a willing and curious partner, we follow whatever path most resonates with that call.
Like its fellow natural state, love, authenticity is not a concept but something lived, experienced, basked in. Most of the time you know it when it’s there.
By definition, striving for some idealized self-image is incompatible with being authentically who one is. We have to begin with accepting ourselves fully, as Anita Moorjani discovered in her encounter with fatal illness.
One of the most direct approaches to authenticity is noticing when it isn’t there, then applying some curiosity and gentle skepticism to the limiting self-beliefs that stand in for it, or just stand in its way. The lack of authenticity makes itself known through tension or anxiety, irritability or regret, depression or fatigue.
Agency is the capacity to freely take responsibility for our existence, exercising “response ability” in all essential decisions that affect our lives, to every extent possible.
Life is so much bigger than us, and we do not forward our own healing by pretending to be in control where we’re not.
Agency is neither attitude nor affect, neither blind acceptance nor a rejection of authority. It
is a self-bestowal of the right to evaluate things freely and fully, and to choose based on authentic gut feelings, deferring to neither the world’s expectations nor the dictates of ingrained personal conditioning.
Healthy anger is a response of the moment, not a beast we keep in the basement, feeding it with shame or self-justifying narratives. It is situational, its duration limited: flashing up when needed, it accomplishes its task of fending off the threat and then subsides. It becomes neither an experience to fear and loathe nor a chronic irritant.
