What Do You Do? 10-25-11

Anderson, South Carolina

We are a society of great pretenders, actors on stage directing our own plays, acting out roles of great wealth and influence. Multi-level marketing schemes thrive in cultures of ‘fake it till you make it.’ We’re told Diamond Directs garner incomes of $100,000 a month, if they get enough people below them selling soap. We pretend to be selling mountains of soap. Ultimately someone has to actually sell soap rather than cheap promises. Millions have become disillusioned with multi-level marketing, once thinking it the fast track to financial Nirvana. Several times I’ve tried this financial Eight-Fold Path, only to end up with a garage full of over-priced inventory.

Hans Selye, the bestselling author of several self-help books, once wrote “Most of our tensions and frustrations stem from compulsive needs to act the role of someone we are not.” We lease $150,000 cars with large up-front deposits and poor reliability ratings to convince those around us of our financial wherewithal. More than fifteen million Americans buy new cars every year, knowing these ‘investments’ will rapidly depreciate, wanting to project an image of prosperity. Tens of millions bought into far more house than they could ever afford. The party ended and a third of American houses are awash in unmanageable debt and the auto industry was bought up by the Federal government. Entire communities have washed away in the housing debt crisis, leaving behind ghost towns but five years old. We buy fake Rolexes to reinforce our holographic image of prosperity. Some of us chase prestigious careers.

As a secular consumer culture in a post-Christian era, we keep score almost exclusively by our accumulation of consumer goods. Hugely profitable self-storage facilities suggest hoarding of consumer detritus has gotten entirely out of hand. In my regular visitation to many homes, I’m always astounded at the sheer amount of ’stuff’ in these places. In the 1990s the Sierra Club published a coffee table book containing a single photograph from each of fifty countries depicting the typical contents of the average house, arrayed in the front yard. The mountain in front of the American house made the other piles look like tiny ant hills.

We’ve become tyrannized by the opinions of others, even those of total strangers. “What would the neighbors think” was long a mantra used to contain aberrant behavior. We kept perfect lawns and had to be the first on the block to have the newest consumer gadget. Homeowners associations now enforce acceptable behavior and an ambience of prosperity.

Family expectations are perhaps most toxic of all. Gabor Mate has a rewarding career studying the consequences of being stressed by the expectations of everyone from our neighbors to our siblings, parents, and in-laws. “Emotionally draining family relationships have been identified as risk factors in virtually every category of major illness, from degenerative neurological conditions to cancer and auto-immune disease.” He further states “It is not other’s expectations and intentions but the perception we have of them that serves as the stressor.” Merely what we think others think of us is the actual emotional toxin that can set us up for a journey through catastrophic emotional and physical illness.

It was made very clear to me in childhood and adolescence that practicing medicine was the only acceptable occupation for me. For decades I chased after that goal, only to learn twenty years too late it was someone else’s expectation for me. I lost thirty years, experiencing no small measure of Mate’s emotionally draining family relationships, only to end up in work for which I was ill suited. The stress of fulfilling others’ expectations led me to a catastrophic diagnosis of degenerative neurologic disease.

The emotional baggage we carry is perhaps a heavier yoke, a greater burden than the mountains in our storage facilities and houses. It takes herculean strength to go to high stress jobs for decades, just to finance a way of life we think others will find acceptable. It may take more strength than we have to walk from them. Many of us, especially men, find identity in our jobs. At retirement, for those surviving that long, the resulting existential crisis can be profound. A large number of men die within a year of retiring; so much of our self-esteem and other people’s opinions of us are tied into our work. The first question usually asked in social encounters is “What do you do?” How much money we earn at that job is nearly as important, allowing us to gain higher scores by accumulating more.

Letting go of a high-profile position in a large hospital was not an easy thing at all. Letting go of robust income, prestige, socializing with colleagues, publishing, and presenting papers at international conferences took several years to accept. For at least two years I was disoriented by the lack of context and structure to my days. Strangers kept asking “What do you do?” I didn’t yet have a clear answer. What was I going to do with seventeen years of medical training? I had no idea.

A foundational truth learned by those embarked on a recovery journey is liberating: a right dependence on God rather than the acquisition of money for financial independence is key to a serene and useful existence. I didn’t have to sell soap. As we grew our dependence on God “money gradually became our servant and not our master. It became a means of exchanging love and service with those about us.” We learned trusting God for our needs and life purpose liberated us from the tyranny of being number one, of ranking first “in the heart-breaking struggle for money, romance, or self importance.” I no longer had to act out roles of great wealth and influence.

Perhaps it’s time to give up pretending; to embrace our own powerlessness, our inability to have it all, to be all. Giving up socially-mandated goals to have the most toys and prestige at death actually liberates us to embrace life this side of the tombstone. It takes less strength and wherewithal to live a spiritually-grounded life than it does to go to a hated job, to lose thirty years of one’s life, to spend years paying off school loans training for ill-suited work. When we transcend what other people think of us we have the possibility of becoming empowered in astounding ways. “Still more wonderful is the feeling that we do not have to be specially distinguished among our fellows in order to be useful and profoundly happy.”

Better yet is this reality: I get His best when I let him do the choosing, even thirty years late.

“I will make up to you for the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the creeping locust, the stripping locust, and the gnawing locust, My great army which I sent among you. And you shall have plenty to eat and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord your God.”