The Hierarchy of Needs

I keep thinking about this thing, even though I haven't taken a psychology course in nine years.

I spoke to a few family members on Sunday, Mother's Day and all. All they talk about is money. How much this one makes, how much that one makes. So and so got bad SAT scores but makes X thousand--it's so unfair! So and so is making plenty of money!

These conversations make me want to stab my eyes out with pens.

Why? Because they don't know anything else exists. They don't know inspiration, creation, aesthetics, art in any form. I'm not talking about going to museums or painting portraits. I'm talking about reading a novel or listening to music or looking at photos on the web. They don't do it. They can't understand it and don't bother trying. Don't know why it exists. Have no ability to learn about anything but buying a house, buying a car.

If all these people care about is money, and they all have enough, whey are they so fucking miserable?

And what if you weren't happy unless you were creating stuff? What then?

The Perils of Being A Smart Kid (Relationships of Command)

Written in a pressurized tube on a Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago
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Smart people run the world. They also have bizarre inferiority complexes and an unstoppable, not-so-hidden need to differentiate themselves from everyone around them by appearing better in some, if not all, ways. In a world of dumb people, smart people think they need to continually outrun everyone around them in order to continue existing.

That's just stupid. Who are you, and who do you become, if you only define yourself as better, smarter, or faster than average? If your life is defined by praise from those you choose to obey?

If you subscribe selectively but exclusively to externally manufactured qualifications for "achievement," you must fall between these extremes:

a)happy, successful, anesthetized, unconscious worker bee
b)miserable, hardworking, conscious individual, who needs to obtain some self-made goals FAST

Right at the midpoint of a and b is the person I call a hack, he or she who knows better but decides to plug away within the system. Ninety-plus percent of Americans may be hacks.

I can't see beyond point b yet.
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After a few uncomfortable-making encounters with some other 20-somethings, I felt a creeping sense that this issue of Achievement Beyond Boundaries was still silently affecting me. One friend spoke of being "addicted to achievement." Another wrote the following string of quotes in a much bigger, better quote that I don't want to replicate here:

"a real problem with needing not only acceptance but praise...not good enough for me to be pleased with the job I've done; I want others to recognize it too...unhealthy to put so much stock in what others think...has always underlined my work in school and in my job."

Um, it sort of sounds like schooling has gotten in the way of our educations. We graft the praise structure we learned in elementary school onto the corporate framework and wait for someone to tell us that we're better than everyone else. Often, we work very hard and conspicuously towards gaining that specific reward. I now realize that this is incredibly immature. It negates or destroys one's critical and artistic abilities; it is fantastically dehumanizing.

Along the lines of dehumanization, blind ambition (inferiority complex) leaves the door wide open for exploitation. A manager who's spent a career hiring dozens of doe-eyed, self-enslaving, overeducated, underpaid, and mentally underdeveloped smart kids knows full well what she or he can inflict upon and expect from another falsely meek praise-seeker.

All this is to say that I am no longer satisfied with the praise system, though some may be. Praise addiction could be a generational thing (we are each a special snowflake), or it could simply be the mark of masochism.

You might be sick of struggling toward the carrot dangling in front of your eyes in search of praise for your struggling. I am. Let's stop being smart kids and become the intelligent, creative adults we deserve to be.