I’m leading a class, The Emotional Consequences of Capitalism, in February and March. It’s about the constant need to “achieve” self-worth in our society and the feeling of never having of being enough. It’s about time, attention, satisfaction, scarcity, sufficiency and how they all relate to the two pillars of our economic system: consumerism and “workism.”
It will be a 8 lessons, 1 per week for 8 weeks. The course is only for FF graduates and will be free, with an option at the end to donate to a collective cause. The course will be more contemplative than FF1 or FF2; the weekly reading will be only 5-10 minutes long. Instead of Zoom sessions, your weekly assignment is to have a “walk and talk” phone conversation with at least one other classmate. No one wants to be online more right now. So, the assignment is to go outside for a walk and have a phone conversation with someone about important stuff. You’ll be contemplating the emotional consequences of our economic system and how you want to be alive in the world. Hope you’re interested! Below is the first lesson.
Lesson 1: What is your deepest longing?
Interview with psychotherapist and soul activist Francis Weller
Weller: One of the things we talk about in the work that I do is that we need to restore, what I call primary satisfaction. The things that we evolved with over hundreds of thousands of years that satisfy the soul at the most basic level; adequate levels of touch, you know, comforting in times of sorrow and loss, celebration and gratitude, gathering food together, eating together under the stars, telling stories around the camp fire, you know, laughing and playfulness together, sensuous erotic connection to the wider world. These are what made us human. But for the most part these things have disappeared. Now, we are left with secondary satisfactions— material goods, seeking power, rank, prestige, addictions— and these things never satisfy the soul.
Anesthesia and amnesia are the two primary “sins” of modern society.
We go numb to try to cope with the fact that we have not been granted what we need to thrive. The levels of addiction in our society are off the charts, and I’m not just talking about alcohol and drugs; I’m talking about shopping, working, sex. Addictions are an attempt to cope with intolerable states. The meager lives we are asked to live, in which we are often reduced to “earning a living,” are themselves intolerable. We are meant to have a more sensuous, imaginative, and creative existence. As children we are enchanted with the world, yet as adults we end up, as poet Mary Oliver said, “breathing just a little, and calling it a life.” That’s the anesthesia.
McKee: And the amnesia?
Weller: We are living in what writer and cultural critic Daniel Quinn calls the Great Forgetting. Many of us have forgotten that we’re a part of an ecosystem, a watershed. We’ve forgotten that we’re kin to all the other animals. We’ve forgotten that we need each other. We have forgotten what I call the “commons of the soul.”
For thousands of years we were nourished by being members of a community, gathering around the fire, hearing the stories of the elders, feeling supported during times of loss and grief, offering gratitude, singing together, sharing meals at night and our dreams in the morning. I call these activities “primary satisfactions.” We are hard-wired to want them, but few of us receive them. In their absence we turn to secondary satisfactions: rank, privilege, wealth, status — or, on the shadow side, addictions. The problem with these secondary satisfactions is that we can never get enough of them. We always want more. But once we find our primary satisfactions, we don’t want much else.
Though primary satisfactions are rare in our culture, we do experience them. We can remember what that felt like and let our longing for that state become our compass, telling us what direction we need to go to get back to those satisfactions. We can find them through our friendships, by spending time in nature, by risking being vulnerable with someone we trust.
The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them. How much sorrow can I hold? That’s how much gratitude I can give. If I carry only grief, I’ll bend toward cynicism and despair. If I have only gratitude, I’ll become saccharine and won’t develop much compassion for other people’s suffering. Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft, which helps make compassion possible.
And we must have compassion for ourselves, too. When I lead workshops on self-compassion, I begin by saying, “This is a weekend in non-self-improvement.” [Laughter.] We’re so driven to make ourselves “better” all the time, as if the better we became, the more people would like us. We are mercilessly hard on ourselves for our losses, our defeats, our wounds, our failures, the parts of us that don’t measure up.
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Assignment: Call someone in your class and do this exercise. I suggest a “walk and talk” for most of the lessons, but this first one you might want to do in a quiet place in your home. The two of you can decide together what you want to do.
Take some time for silence and calming your nervous system together. When you both feel ready, choose one person to ask the other, quietly, “What is your deepest longing?“
That person just talks and the other person just listens. When they're finished speaking, allow a little silence, and then the partner asks the question again: “What is your deepest longing?” Go through this pattern as many times as necessary until the person says they think they've touched the core. You'll know when you've reached the core.
Then repeat with the other person.
After you are both done, have a conversation about your deepest longing. Is it a “primary satisfaction?” What relationship does money have, if any, to it? Does money help or inhibit you receiving your deepest satisfaction? What did you learn from this exercise? Post your reflection if you like.