Time to Wake Up
‘Time to Wake Up’ features in Decision Magazine
‘Greed is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed in all of its forms, greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.’
Those were the words from the infamous Gordon Gekko speech that epitomised the late 80’s. I was sold. For a boy who grew up poor, it made complete sense to me for the first 25 years of my adulthood. ‘Millionaire by thirty’ was my daily mantra since I was 16 years old. And I smashed it at 29, with 105 days to go. ‘Welcome to the club, good for you!’ I remember one older friend saying in a sincere but inadvertently patronising kind of way, because I’d just become the poorest member of a club with an unquenchable desire for more.
‘Attitude determines Altitude’ and ‘You get what you aim for’, among a thousand other sound bites that drove my sales training and team building through subsequent successful companies. The slogans are true, on both accounts, though maybe I should have heeded my Grandmother’s advice, which seemed so ineffectual at the time; ‘be careful what you wish for’. For almost three decades, all I wished for was more.
My journey started pre-internet and any form of social media. Showing off your success to strangers was limited to how you dressed, the watch on your wrist and the car you drove, given that most people would never see your home, your holiday snaps or more intimate elements of your personal life. The more detailed showing off was saved for friends – sounds abrasive doesn’t it? We don’t even like to admit the idea of it, but we’re nearly all guilty to varying degrees. However, unless you were famous, back then there was really no ‘vehicle’ to show off every aspect of your success to the masses; as it turns out, that was a really good thing.
The 1% of unusually successful, non-famous people didn’t really have much of a mechanism to rub it into the noses of the majority. At the time, no one really felt a need to either. Keeping up with the Jones’ was the notion that you’d be doing as well as your friends and neighbours, or ideally just a bit better. Perhaps it would extend to work colleagues too, but in essence for the non-famous, one’s audience was limited.
In the space of a few years, everything changed; each individual had a platform through which to communicate. Suddenly, everybody could be the star in their own film.
The excesses of the late 80’s and 90’s compounded into the noughties and exacerbated the divide between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’. In business, corporate greed became far more apparent, exampled with multipliers of a Managing Director wage vs. worker wage rising from 14 times to a now not uncommon level of 250 times. The big bang occurred, and whereas city members were once proud of their integrity and ethos, a business culture had developed where the sole measure of success was wealth creation. Greed became acceptable among the people who had been in the top element of society. By the time we arrived at 2008 with the economic meltdown, instead of experiencing a traditional collapse, followed by a rebalancing that involved everyone suffering collectively over say, a three-year period, we saw that the top 5% of workers (the ‘haves’) were protected, while everyone else bore the cost of the actions of the few.
Wealth was becoming increasingly elusive yet simultaneously thrust upon the majority through communications channels that stimulated brain function in ways akin to cocaine. The feeling of inadequacy was bestowed increasingly upon the average person, disproportionately on teens and younger adults with no other framework against which to compare this paradigm.
Facebook was the gateway drug for the masses to shift their orientation towards narrating every detail of their lives, while glossing the content wherever possible. Essentially a valuable friend network, it focused upon the written word as a significant element. This enabled communities, families and friendship groups to maintain a high level of connection and communication that just wasn’t possible before. It was addictive nonetheless, as a result of its users becoming increasingly tied to the process of cultivating façade, while simultaneously yearning for connection to search for the meaningfulness that lacks, for many, in every day existence.
In contrast to the group cohesion that Facebook provided, Instagram was more akin to a shop window. A platform aimed at generating followers rather than communities; a modern-day stage. In addiction terms, if Facebook was the alcohol, Instagram emerged as the crystal meth.
By 2017, with close to a billion Instagram users, the window into everyone’s lives was now well and truly open. It was time to fake it ‘til you make it. The name of the game being to ‘gloss’ the perfect existence – the ultimate in showing off, though ironically in today’s culture, for most users it now seems as though it’s barely keeping up. Narcissism was once a public attribute for the few famous people with some sort of talent, but now it is for the majority. The excesses are out of control, the desire for a mixture of money, fame, surgery and elite lifestyle is the bedrock of most millennials. Whereas status used to be focused upon tangible accolades, such as lineage, academic qualification or artistic talent to name a few, it now manifests as those who can display the trappings of success, even if untrue.
These platforms prey on three characteristics that are in the vast majority of people; the desire for more, the need to display success and the underlying insecurity that lurks in the back of one’s mind – the latter two points being deeply connected.
Social media hasn’t changed anything or created anything new within the individual. All it has done is expose and amplify elements of the narcissistic disease that every human possesses to some degree. Which is why, pre-internet, only a few were privileged enough to express this disease for the personal/professional development industry and media to trade off. Today, via a variety of social media platforms, the expression of narcissism is accessible to everyone.
Our youth is bombarded with dangerous imagery, song lyrics and peer pressure, coupled with ubiquitous pornography, that pays homage to a misogynistic, stoic and dominant patriarchy, irrespective of whether it’s real or not. This results in so many young women subliminally feeling the need to portray a sexualised public proposition, to just fit in with these male ideals. Ironically, these social channels flaunting highly-inflated lifestyles, where the currency is sex and wealth, are often in the guise of ‘strong independent women’ and ‘girl power’, yet these influencers are inadvertently promoting the shallow values with which they’ve been indoctrinated, with the belief that they are healthy aspirations.
None of this is new though; sexual attractiveness and wealth have always been currencies. The issue now, however, is the scale to which it is being communicated and the depth to which this insidious need for self-promotion, fabrication and external validation is dominating so much of the average person’s existence. In turn, this shift is decimating the core understanding, for both young men and women, of how successful relationships work – the ramifications of this will be both severe and long lasting.
Against this backdrop, we are now living in a world where we are told anyone can be anything. We should pursue the perfect career – ‘do what you love’ and aspire to the perfect relationship. Richard Branson once said ‘There is no greater thing you can do with your life and your work than follow your passions. As soon as something stops being fun, I think it’s time to move on.’
These are impossible goals for the vast majority, yet they are thrust upon the people on a minute-by-minute basis, through a plethora of social channels. It is no wonder that the natural conclusion to convincing the masses that the impossible (for most) should be achievable, is an increase in mental illness and depression; triggered as a result of swathes of the population feeling a high degree of complete failure.
Similar to my sales training and my journey; these messages work for the privileged few, not the majority. How can everyone do what they love and follow their passion? Our global workforces would evaporate and we’d be awash with yoga teachers and ski instructors, or whatever floats one’s boat. But we certainly wouldn’t have 90% of the jobs filled where people are currently performing a role in order to put food on the table for their families.
There was a time when I subscribed completely to this Branson-style logic; it was working for me so it made sense. I built companies and sold them, I built marriages and broke them… I moved on when it stopped being fun. Then suddenly it didn’t make so much sense – the rhetoric from the positivity bench often fails to acknowledge the importance of community, connection and goals beyond personal achievement. Indeed, the very essence of ‘Follow your passions. As soon as something stops being fun, I think it’s time to move on’ is essentially very selfish.
And it’s with this personal growth, self-help, NLP-filled world of positive messaging that I now take issue. A world in which I was an advocate for so long, in order to achieve my goals and accomplish extraordinary achievements, yet I now wonder if I was even playing the right game?
We are now entering an era where an entire generation aspires and expects to achieve a lifestyle that can only be reserved for less than 1%. Yet they are told it’s completely possible and therefore, by implication, if they don’t achieve it then the fault must be with them. It is now completely normal for people to live two lives; the real one and the online version. Events must be narrated. Special moments, for many, aren’t valid unless captured and published. Wealth is virtually everyone’s God and everyone else seems to be living their best life. Rags to riches stories are abundant while hard work and study is rarely centre stage. The underlying principle here is commerce; it’s all just business. Pre-internet, millions of pounds were made trading on this disease. Now, narcissism is a multi-billion-dollar enterprise because it can be exposed and amplified with ease and maturity.
Despite this technology providing the most wonderful benefits to humankind, such as rapid distribution of medical information or facilitating minorities to stand against oppression, this narcissistic aspect of social media – the most prevalent use of the platform - is rotten to the core. Western society is rapidly losing its way, followed closely by pretty much the rest of the planet. Isolation and loneliness are at unprecedented levels. Societal values are being traded from true accomplishment to vacuous fame. Celebrity status and wealth now occupy far too much of the national psyche. Our political system is broken and en masse, we are failing to address effectively the impact of climate change and the ramifications of an unsustainable ageing population.
So, greed is not good, it is the disease of narcissism that is now a tradable commodity. By definition though, such a commodity will someday be worthless, and other phenomena will be traded in its place. In the wake of that destruction, hopefully that will be empathy or compassion or both.
You get what you aim for – sometimes. Aim carefully.