This anger isn’t restricted to liberal college students who read half of a blood stained Marx essay, it can be seen all over the United States since the so-called ‘economic collapse’ of 2008.  The quarter life crisis has become the norm, and millions of college students graduate every year to dead-end jobs and little hope of long term success.  This has sparked nihilistic twenty-something cultures of coffee fueled inquiries into novelty and an embodied sense of postmodern murkiness.  Digital hipsterati have proclaimed themselves liberated of the status quo and free to pen the neo-manifesto’s of the cybernetic age without concern for whose work they bastardizing or the rhetorical traps in which they are ensnared.  I will term these self aggrandizing rebranded self-help digital hipsters ‘dipsters’ throughout this essay.

Misunderstanding paradigms and texts are the norm, as dipsters are not concerned with understanding the texts they are building on, or citing them. Dipsters are only interested in creating writing that merely has the appearance of intelligence and depth.  Dipsters are often found constantly masturbating to inspirational TED Talks, content to be inspired by the future but not actively involved in its creation.  Dipsters are potent generalists, often directing this energy at the creation of short flamboyant PDF documents they call “ebooks.”  The intellectual task of reviewing literature, understanding the texts, and then synthesizing them into new ideas is lost on them, the only task that matters is putting their own unique paradigm out there for other dipsters to read in implied great acclaim.  Digital hipsterism is purely anti-intellectual. Depth of research and well reasoned arguments are not valued, but merely the appearance of depth is regarded as the ideal.  Criticism is dismissed by way of suggesting that the criticizer is ‘just being negative,’ that they should go and do something else ‘useful’ by creating a movement of their own, or that they simply aren’t sophisticated enough to understand the new paradigm being created.

A perfect example of a digital hipsterati manifesto is “How To Be ExPoMod” by Drew Jacob.  Jacob argues that there have been “changes in technology, art, the economy, and what people want in life” that are enough to “establish a new zeitgiest” and “a new paradigm.”  In order to rhetorically establish this new paradigm, Jacob has taken it upon himself to single handedly declare postmodernism dead.  In a completely fallacious appeal to popularity Jacob begins his post: “It’s an open secret that postmodernism is dead. Most people say “dying,” out of respect for the old king. But the position is vacant.”  Funny, nobody informed the critical theorists of this so called “open secret.”

Jacob calls his new paradigm “expostmodernism”, and suggests that it is descendant from the enlightenment, modernism, and finally postmodernism.  Like many freshman English and Philosophy students, Jacob has taken it upon himself to once and for all create a response to the postmodern problem without reading nearly enough of the bounty of available literature.  I must admit, I myself have skated across this cliche in my early studies of rhetoric and poststructural theory, but I was fortunate to be steered by a wise advisor to foundational poststructural texts from minds such as Lyotard, Baudrillard, Foucault, and Derrida, and I had the foresight to settle down my academic horses realizing that I was being fucking stupid.

Jacob describes postmodernism as set a attitudes: relativism, cynicism, and alienation.    Missing the massive elephant in the room, he passes over the vast philosophical insights of poststructuralism, and blindly assumes that postmoderinity’s reign is dictated by it’s influence on the attitudes feelings of the people at large.  The fact that he believes that the validity of postmodernism pivots around the attitudes of the people is the primary problems of his analysis.  He argues that the main shift centers around what youth chose to do: “In popular narrative this led to an iconic lifestyle arc: the youth who is rebellious and individualistic, but eventually settles down, gets a job, and does what society expects.

“The new narrative is a radically different arc: the individual who was settled, had a job, and realizes they can leave it behind to follow their passion—successfully.”  In most pathetic form, Jacob presents the successor to postmodernism as lifestyle design.  He supports this by suggesting that people are now able to receive “satisfaction” in more ways than ever because of increased availability of choices and that this increased “satisfaction” is the replacement for postmodern alienation.

Laypeople mistakenly think that postmodernism requires an additional post at it’s bow because of their fundamental misunderstanding of what poststructuralism is, and how subjectivity functions.  Poststructuralism suggests that is there is no Truth with a capital T, in the sense that there is no way to accurately ascertain what it is, and even which it is.  Foucault often wrote about access to truth as if it were layers of an infinite onion.  The sophomoric mistake is to take subjective truth as a detriment, as alienation, or a problem.  Jacob has done exactly this.

The deliciously ironic twist in Jabob’s essay is that without realizing it, he has written a postmodern critique of modernism.  His “proof” for “expostmodernism” all center around decentralized power, the ability of the individual to choose what’s best for them, and the notion that the artist is the true “cutting edge” of society.  These themes are decidedly postmodern, and in the end his “expostmodernism” means exactly nothing. Furthermore, Jacob’s underlying thesis is that lifestyle design is the way of the future, however lifestyle design itself is the same old capitalistic story of an individual picking themselves up by their boostraps and living their way in the world, and shaping it in their own image.  Thus Jacob’s essay awkwardly walks the divide between the subjectivity of postmodernity and the patriarchal individualism of modernity under the guise of being new and progressive.  Ultimately suggesting that lifestyle design is the response to postmodernism is a pathetically uninformed thesis that even a freshman English student should be embarrassed of.

Jacob’s essay fits very neatly in to the dipster ethos by presenting a seemingly inspired piece that in fact has no depth or inertia whatsoever.  The dipster anti-intellectual elite is a growing cancerous mass in the online sphere.  They call themselves lifestyle designers,  revolutionaries, non-conformists, unconventionals, connectors, and world dominators.  Their obsessive writings about pointless self-help drivel and pick yourself by your bootstraps capitalism claims to be a new digital revolution of freedom for the world’s working class, but the reality is they are only supporting and strengthening the capitalistic and social status quo by means of very public masturbation.

Image credit.

Details of the Energetic Abundant Mystic Telesummit…

Learn Practical Energy Tools for Creating TRUE Abundance

10 Master teachers share powerful energy tools for abundance The Energetics of TRUE Abundance started Monday~

This telesummit is going to rock your world!

It i a unique opportunity for you to learn, in an intensive format, powerful, practical energy tools for creating TRUE Abundance in YOUR life!
Click here to listen to all of the amazing interviews:

This is an Intensive for one full week:

Unlike other telesummits, this is an intensive and runs for just one week. Each day there will be 2 featured faculty sessions. And there is absolutely no cost to you to participate in all of these abundance-enhancing live calls!

You’ll get fr-ee access to 10 Master Teachers sharing their insights and, more importantly, leading you through powerful, experiential processes to awaken the energetic flow of abundance in YOU!

Every one of the master teachers in this summit will share at least one experiential process that will tap you into a deeper connection with TRUE Abundance.

Oh and just for signing up, you’ll receive some amazing bonus gifts from the faculty, over $200 worth of gifts to be exact!

When you join the Energetics of TRUE Abundance you’ll have the opportunity to participate in 10 life changing sessions. And it will cost you absolutely nothing to be on the live calls.

These sessions will, quite literally, transform your life. Next week, you could look back at this moment and say, “This was the moment I chose TRUE Abundance for my life!”

I hope to see you on the Energetics of TRUE Abundance summit!

To sign up for FREE telesummitt and listen to the wonderful interviews~

The link in the email goes here, to a manipulative bait-and-switch “squeeze page” that features a manically gesticulating man enthusiastically spouting vague nonsense reminiscent of Steve Jobs and his lackeys hyping the latest “revolutionary” product.

The squeeze page promises a free teleseminar, only to deceptively then sell the website visitor with a long form sales letter for an “upgrade” (since the original free offer is actually somewhat inconvenient to take advantage of) once you hand over your name and email. All of this is pretty standard fare, as these kinds of marketing sales pages are templates designed by scam artist gurus like the members of the internet marketing cartel known as The Syndicate.

Energy, Emotion, and Bad Metaphors

In New Age jargon, “energy” doesn’t refer to electricity and magnetism but means emotion, especially emotion felt as sensations on the body—but new agers are rarely very precise in their language, often preferring vague terms to specific ones. Nevertheless, electrical energy is a relatively common and fitting metaphor for many emotional states and bodily sensations:

• “I’m feeling energized”
• “I’m drained” (as in a electric battery)
• “It hit me like a bolt of lightning”
• “When they first saw each other, they were immediately attracted” (as in a magnet)
• etc.

To some extent, how we think and feel influences other people and the behaviors we are likely to engage in—sometimes even in ways that seem magical, surprising, or mysterious. If nothing else is working to make a desired change, this hard-to-pin-down energetic X-factor is often what is missing. This simple insight has been turned into an extreme ideological position in the so-called “Law of Attraction,” aka “The Science of Success” which is codified in the aphorism “like attracts like.” Whereas electrical energy fits as a metaphor for emotion, “like attracts like” immediately strikes anyone with a grade-school knowledge of physics as deeply flawed, since positive charged particles in fact attract negatively charged ones.

Water, fire, air and dirt
Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?
And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist
Y’all motherfuckers lyin’, and getting me pissed.

- Insane Clown Posse, Miracles (2009)

Even though we do in fact know a whole lot about how magnets work, one can still experience awe that the Universe has been constructed with such intricate complexity. Similarly, the experiences we have when we are “aligned” or “in energetic resonance with” a particular course of action or desired outcome are actually quite predictable and rational especially in hindsight, even though our experience of such times can be deeply, profoundly moving. Or as the Insane Clown Posse so memorably put it…

Despite the backwards magnetic metaphor, our thoughts and emotions do have some influence on what we “attract” into our lives, and changing our overall worldview, state, or way of being is sometimes a useful leverage point in achieving the outcomes we want.

In essence, “the energetics of money” therefore refers to the overall gestalt of we generally feel, think, and behave about money, spending, saving, investing, earnings, etc. It also refers to the likely consequences of our behaviors and the types of people we associate with. Pretty much everyone has some unreasonable fears, worries, avoidance behavior, unhelpful attitudes, or irrational logic when dealing with personal finances. For instance, one might worry incessantly about having enough money in savings, becoming an utter miser even though one’s bank account has many years worth of expenses saved. Or one might do the opposite, spending a large paycheck entirely and never saving, taking out additional credit to purchase more and more unnecessary consumer goods and services.

Sometimes these unhelpful behaviors are primarily psychological and can be dealt with on the personal level of “energetics.” At other times it is more accurate to see certain unhelpful behaviors, negative feedback loops, or financial suffering as systemic, a result of economic policy, gentrification, predatory lending practices, ecological destruction, or other social, cultural, or political forces. “Law of Attraction” proponents typically blame victims of economic policies and other collective, systemic forces as having bad attitudes and having “attracted” their fate, which is why I call this an extreme ideological view based on a real psychological insight taken far out of its proper context.

The Energetics of the Bait and Switch

So what is the energetics of the marketing tactics used in selling this “telesummit” on the energetics of money? Well, my response to the sales page was disgust, righteous indignation, and the thought “this is another bullshit new age bait-and-switch scam.” Since energy in this case is a metaphor for emotion and thought, this page “attracted” these responses from me and my response therefore constitutes at least part of the overall “energetics” of this approach to money. In other words, the energetics of this bait and switch is—at least in part and to some people—scammy, scummy, greedy, sleazy, manipulative, coercive, not forthright, cheesy, below the belt, whatever you want to call it. No matter what any of the “faculty” of this teleseminar say during their actual calls, the way the whole event is promoted frames the energetics of the event itself.

But wait…I can already hear the New Agers’ response: “no, that’s your energy, Duff. It’s a reflection of your own ‘money shadow,’ ‘poverty consciousness,’ blah blah blah.” Nope—bait and switch is bait and switch. I fully acknowledge that I am an imperfect human being. I also acknowledge that other people may have a different response to a bait and switch tactic like this one. The fact remains however that there is some deception going on here.

This kind of marketing will reliably elicit compliance through creating cognitive dissonance, but it is not straightforward, up-front, compassionate or frankly, right. That’s my opinion at least, and I want nothing to do with anyone who would be a part of something like this, due to the bad juju being emitted from it. It would be an entirely different “energetic” if the sales pitch was on the home page, or there was some information about the schedule and pricing up front, and if the sales pitch was straightforward and down to earth. It would especially be a different energetic if some of the criticisms of the extreme “Law of Attraction” view were acknowledged and integrated, removing all blame and shame towards those who are not currently living in financial abundance, and acknowledging the systematic oppression and hegemony of the global economic situation at large.

The problem with doing a job you hate is worse than mere alienation or not self-actualizing, as most personal development gurus put it.  Doing a good job—but without a convincing display of enthusiasm—will get you fired.

In our hypercompetitive capitalist environment, you are competing with people who either love to do what you are doing for a living (even though you hate it) and/or can pretend to love the work more “authentically” than you. These happy-looking people work harder, longer, and don’t complain to management when their health benefits are taken away. Your job security is at risk if you don’t give a convincing display of loving your work, hence all the anxiety-driven, manic (tom peters!) search for one’s “true” calling.

The demand to not only do a good job but have a mandatory positive attitude creates a context in which those that hate their jobs and aren’t afraid to show it get fired. Furthermore, most of their co-workers believe this is a just cause for termination. After all, so-and-so had a bad attitude and was bringing down the team. So much for authenticity!

In many ways it would be better if the culture at large accepted that work…well, it’s work! For almost everyone, work sucks. But since the corporate culture in America says “thou shalt love thy job (or else!),” we strive to pretend to be happy doing things we’d rather not.

Joanna: You know what, Stan, if you want me to wear 37 pieces of flair, like your pretty boy over there, Brian, why don’t you just make the minimum 37 pieces of flair?
Stan, Chotchkie’s Manager: Well, I thought I remembered you saying that you wanted to express yourself.
Joanna: Yeah. You know what, yeah, I do. I do want to express myself, okay. And I don’t need 37 pieces of flair to do it.
[flips off Stan]
~from the movie “Office Space”

We wear “pieces of flair” (i.e. expressions of our passion for our work) because it’s mandatory. But it’s not enough, because what’s really mandatory is that you enjoy wearing your pieces of flair—and any perceived inauthenticity in such a display can cost you your job. This is why Joanna’s anger is refreshingly authentic, or at least was when Office Space came out. Nowadays many more people (especially the younger Millennial generation) are like Brian, whether they work for a large corporate entity, or are “solo-preneurs” relentlessly promoting their authentic personal brand by showing what a great life they have (and you can too!). Frank Kern has his surfboards, Chris Guillebeau has his world traveling, but every guru has their enthusiastic embrace of the crumbling work/play dichotomy.

While most of us at times fantasize about finding work we love that pays us handsomely, many would be quite content to have work they can tolerate and enough time in the evenings and on weekends to do what they want as long as they don’t have to pretend that they love what pays the bills. This public-private division is being eroded whether we like it or not. Many personal development folks claim that the belief that work has to suck is negative cultural conditioning created by corporate interests to prevent us from being our true selves. We should also ask ourselves whether the desire to find work we love is the more damaging cultural conditioning, being that it is pressure to accept the hypercompetitive new economy that benefits a few at the expense of the many.

Presenting an image of loving one’s work isn’t just a corporate culture thing—it pervades the get-rich-quick and get-lifestyle-quick schemes that present themselves as a key to “escaping cubicle nation” and becoming “paid to exist.” This is true whether the source is  Syndicate-based or “third tribe” (which is really the same thing anyhow). Nowhere is someone allowed to just dislike their work and prefer a private life that has nothing to do with making money.

Job security has effectively been eliminated, but we don’t fight it. Instead, we now volunteer to “embrace chaos”—having totally surrendered to the ethic of unrelenting corporate competition with no real social net to speak of. Loving one’s work is now a requirement for job security in the age of anxiety, where one could be fired for frowning or otherwise indulging in negative thinking (such as predicting an impending mortgage crisis a few years ago). Today’s self-help guru fully embraces the demand for and image of work-as-passion, whether or not the day-in-day-out realities line up with the personal branding.

Readers of Beyond Growth already know some of my opinions about Robbins and his approach to personal development, something I call “aggressive positivity.” Tom Shales, writing for the Washington Post, reviewed Breakthrough saying “at no point does Robbins suggest that it just might possibly be society that has failed.” Shales reviewed multiple episodes of the show, but only one has come out to the public so far, so I will be reviewing just Episode 1 (warning—I pretty much spoil the whole episode in my review, so watch the above first if you don’t want spoilers). I think this review may be particularly interesting to Beyond Growth readers because it is more balanced than my standard reviews of Robbins’ work (probably Eric Normand’s influence!).

Analyzing Tony Robbins “Breakthrough”

Episode 1, Frank and Kristen

Frank broke his neck in the pool on their wedding day, has been in a wheelchair since, and his wife Kristen has become his caretaker. A sad story indeed, especially given the timing of the accident. On the screen flashes…

“Step 1: Rewrite Your Story”

I suppose this is the first step in transforming difficult life circumstances culminating in a “breakthrough,” according to Robbins, the show’s producer. Note that the term “breakthrough” already conveys aggressiveness. Personally, my recommendation for a first step is to face reality as it is, noting what happened exactly and noticing exactly what constitutes one’s experience, but Robbins doesn’t get to this until a little later.

Because they went to a beautiful place and had tragedy, Robbins brings them to his island resort in Fiji (another beautiful place) for a new experience. Not a bad intervention in some ways, but not exactly practical for your average viewer. In fact, this intervention may convey more hopelessness than anything, for it’s difficult to see how I, the viewer, can change my life without all that money (but if only I could afford Robbins’ Mastery University, part of which takes place in Fiji…).

In Robbins’ Unleash the Power Within seminar, linked to from the “insider” website about the show, he pitches his advanced workshops in Fiji with the notion that if you think you can’t afford to put down the $500 non-refundable down payment right there for the multiple thousands of dollars course, it’s only because of your limiting beliefs about money that will keep you unsuccessful forever. (Robbins’ financial success is of course in part based upon this very aggressive sales pitch.) Having been subjected to that abuse, I can’t help but make the connection and wonder to what extent this show functions primarily as an infomercial for his seminars. I also can’t help but think to what extent this show exists to rewrite Mr. Robbins’ public image as a 1980′s infomercial star and hyped-up, now out-of-favor motivational speaker. But in any case, let’s get back to the show.

“Step 2: Confront Your Real Issues”

By this point, Frank and Kristen have not at all completed step one. Their story is basically the same, even after having first arrived at Robbins’ Namale Resort in Fiji. But they do appear optimistic that Robbins can perhaps help.

The couple does list their real issues:

• trauma from the specific accident at their wedding
• debilitating spinal damage that has lead to Frank being quadriplegic
• difficulty coping with the physical and medical difficulties
• loss of potential family and marriage plans and associated grief
• Frank’s dependence on Kristen’s continual care

“Tomorrow I’m going to give you both a task, and it will be an aggressive task … But you’ve got to complete it to continue the journey,” says Robbins (emphasis mine). But then Robbins introduces a plan on day 2 that doesn’t exactly have anything to do with confronting real issues. Instead of brainstorming ways of dealing with their challenges, they are to go…

Skydiving!

Granted, Robbins does set up this ordeal with some intelligent framing. Comparing the last time they spent time in an exotic location together, he says that they took a leap and it didn’t turn out well, now they will take another leap. So perhaps we can read this as “ordeal therapy” as in Jay Haley’s book of the same title, based on Milton Erickson’s sometimes strange ordeals he gave clients as metaphors for their problem.

Robbins explains that the “method to his madness” is to trigger a breakthrough—not just now but long-term, helping these folks (his clients) to take control of their lives. The big question is whether this metaphor will generalize, and whether it is even the right metaphor, and whether the risk is appropriate. Tandem skydiving is pretty low-risk, but not without any risks. Has proper risk assessment been done and explained to Kristen and Frank? What is the lesson here to viewers about cost-benefit analysis of risktaking? Is skydiving even analogous to the kinds of changes Frank and Kristen are wanting to make in their lives, or is this just “Fear Factor”-like reality TV entertainment? I wonder specifically because we don’t know why Frank broke his neck—was he acting carelessly while drunk perhaps? Perhaps the lesson needs to be to be more cautious!

But before they go skydiving, Robbins says he will give them tools “to experience the raw strength and power that’s inside them.”

“Step 3: Discover Your Inner Strength”

Robbins first elicits Kristen’s weakest aspects of herself and gets her to fully associate into her suffering, reducing her to tears. This is hardly discovering her inner strength! There is no other time that Robbins elicits Kristen’s strength in the whole show, despite numerous challenges to support Frank’s “inner strength.” While clearly Frank is the one in the wheelchair, I can’t help but think that their marriage will be better if both partners feel strong and resourceful—why take Kristen down to show Frank’s strength?

He then has Frank be really present with Kristen in order to show his strength. Not exactly a girl-power kind of intervention here! But it is an interesting role reversal in getting the apparently weak paraplegic to be the strong one emotionally. I found this touching in that Frank was able to be strong when apparently (physically) so weak.

Robbins: “That’s the beginning of a breakthrough. Our job now is to improve on that on our second challenge, skydiving, which is going to be aggressive, but I think will provide even more of what they need. It will provide the next step.” Again with the aggressive—oh vey! But I suppose no one would watch a TV show called “The Gentle Way” where contestants compete to see who can be more kind to themselves and each other.

“Step 4: Redefine What is Possible”

Apparently the producers (i.e. Robbins) think step 3 is over with, but Kristen still hasn’t discovered her inner strength—just Frank. Step 1 still isn’t done, as their story is largely the same. A small but significant change took place with the role reversal of care exercise in step 3, the best therapeutic intervention so far. No other “real issues” have been confronted or dealt with in any way at this point that I can tell though.

Robbins says that Kristen needs to see Frank as strong in order to change their life situation. Why not Frank seeing Frank as strong, or Kristen seeing Kristen as strong, or Frank seeing Kristen’s strength? I didn’t hear “strength” being a part of the language of either Kristen or Frank—seems to me interjection of Robbins’ values here rather than what is being expressed by the couple themselves.

As they take off in a helicopter to skydive, Robbins reminds Frank and Kristen of the metaphor of the ordeal: “just remember what this is—a new life, a brand new life.” One has to give Robbins credit here—he definitely has a method to his madness, and is very consistent with following through with his method. I have noticed however that metaphors are usually more powerful if the individual interprets them for themselves rather than making them explicit like this. For instance, asking a child “what do you think this means?” invites them to think about a situation, lending more involvement and participation, rather than moralizing or interpreting “this means X” for them. This is clearly Robbins’ show—in more ways than one—and not exactly client-directed therapy!

Frank found the skydiving an amazing experience, and Kristen reported that Frank was the strong one, able to support her through the experience which made her “feel like a wife.” On the one hand, this is a great continuation of the role-reversal of Kristen being the co-dependent caretaker. On the other hand, this strikes me as an unneeded emphasis on heteronormative gender roles. Why can’t both feel like they are strong and resourceful, both able to support each other as appropriate? Why does Robbins imply that Kristen needs to be submissive and powerless to feel like a wife? Probably because Robbins subscribes to (and teaches) David Deida’s spiritualization of gender essentialism that Deida teaches in his Way of the Superior Man and related weekend workshops (at least one of which costs $3000 for an individual or $5000 per couple and is sponsored by “pick-up artist” Eben Pagan).

Robbins asks Frank and Kristen what the skydiving meant to them, and they responded that it meant they could “do anything.” Kristen and Frank definitely look more open-minded about change now, which is good, although I’m concerned that “anything” is a bit too open about possibilities, not yet fully confronting the reality of their difficulties. Clearly there are things that a paraplegic simply cannot do, or even that someone who has full use of their limbs cannot do.

Robbins then presents the next challenge, somewhat mysteriously (to create reality TV tension no doubt, as the music underscores at this point), saying that each of them has needs they haven’t been meeting, so each will have their own separate tasks to fulfill that will involve some risk and danger. I have to ask why risk and danger is necessary here—emotional risk perhaps, or perceived danger, but why real risk and danger? Couldn’t there be a gentler intervention?

“Step 5: Exceed Your Expectations”

Frank is scared. Robbins says “Frank is going to get physical here. He’s going to find out how strong he really is, that he’s not fragile.” The task is basically to play rugby for paraplegics—a game called “Murderball.” If this isn’t aggressive positivity, I don’t know what is!

Robbins says that this will teach Frank that he is strong. Of course another equally likely possibility is that he will be utterly humiliated and feel weak, especially compared to these Olympic athlete caliber players. That doesn’t happen here, probably due to careful framing of the experience, but certainly has been the case for many people who attempt athletics as kids or even as out-of-shape adults. Many who try to get fit as adults go too hard and injure themselves, or else end up associating pain and self-punishment with moving their already stiff and painful bodies. (I myself recently got back into regular fitness in 2010, starting with very minimal and gentle exercise, and working up to 30 minutes of continuous vigorous calisthenics—pushups, pullups, situps, and bodyweight squats. I attribute my success this time to the gentle, patient, and persistent approach I took—vowing to never go beyond my limits.)

Robbins says “Instead of trying to tell someone, give them an experience and then it’s true for them.” Frank gets lots of positive feedback, and the head Murderball player says he “really exceeded everyone’s expectations.”

Meanwhile, Kristen is whisked off to a spa where she gets private yoga and golf instruction, so that she can experience herself as separate, have time to grieve, and know that Frank can exist on his own without her constant monitoring. I think the time away is great in some ways, helping Kristen to see Frank as more independent and thus breaking co-dependent patterns. But note here that the “needs” each one of them has is strongly gendered—Robbins mind-reads that Frank has needs to play aggressive sports while Kristen has needs to be pampered at a spa. Robbins didn’t ask (at least not on camera) what their unmet needs are. Perhaps Frank could really use a massage! It’s also a class message—if you’re rich and need a break, take a vacation away from your spouse at a fancy spa. This isn’t exactly a practical solution for most viewers.

An Olympic Murderball player takes Frank to his home and says that his wife is pregnant and Frank gets curious, because he and Kristen were wanting to have kids and don’t feel they can now. This was a really ingenious way of opening Frank up to the possibilities of having kids as a paraplegic. But it wouldn’t necessarily have been impossible to just have told him directly. A local branch of a nonprofit for people with disabilities could have done just as well without having to fly around the world. Viewers are not necessarily being educated about such public resources in this program, which emphasizes more the genius of one man and his ability to change lives.

Frank is going to play in a real Murderball game, and Robbins flew in his wife and family to watch. “This is something he wouldn’t have done before” says Kristen. But then again, it’s something that Frank didn’t decide to do now either! He did it because he was on TV and tricked into doing it by Robbins. Just as it is better to have an experience than be told something, it is better to decide to do something than be forced or tricked into doing it. Will Frank continue taking such positive risks once he is no longer on the show? Few other reality TV contestants continue the changes they make while on their show due to the “unreal” context that is so removed from daily life.

At the end of the game, his family and friends express how inspiring it was for them, how proud of him they were, etc. which I found very inspiring and heartwarming. Having friends and family express appreciation can be a powerful exercise.

Frank had a dream of racing a truck in the desert but “knows” he will never do so now. “Where is your truck?” Asks Robbins. Frank says “in a million pieces” and Robbins says “no, it’s not” ’cause he had it moved into his driveway. And the next step he says is to have his friends and him work on it so he can race it with Robbins in the passenger seat.

This show is like one surprise party after another! Clearly this is the “reality” element of the reality TV show that is highly unrealistic and relies on a huge budget—something few viewers will be able to “achieve” with this 7-step process. That said, none of these specifics—jumping out of an airplane, playing special olympics games, or fixing and racing a car—are really that outrageous for disabled people to do in my opinion. I too would challenge Frank’s “knowledge” of his inabilities, as they are simply inaccurate based on what other people have done. By the way, no mania is required here—just facts. Many folks with lost limbs or other “disabilities” have done feats that able-bodied individuals would find incredible. While many such activities might very well be out of the realm of possibility for someone newly injured, most aren’t impossible depending on the individual’s actual health condition, and many are even do-able with little money.

“This isn’t just about building Frank’s truck. This is about Frank realizing that he never has to give up on his dreams,” says Robbins. If Frank has dreams of running a marathon, he’d probably have to give up on that, considering he has no use of his lower limbs. But certain specific dreams are still attainable, like fixing his truck and driving it in the desert with special equipment to drive a car with your hands. It’s very important that we not overgeneralize here—overgeneralization is what created the false belief of Frank’s that he “knew” he couldn’t fix his truck now. Creating more overgeneralization by saying “he never has to give up on his dreams” will lead to just as many problems in the opposite direction.

“Step 6: Change Your Belief System”

“I’m in my truck. I didn’t think it would ever get done,” says Frank, with wet eyes. A very touching moment, to be sure!

One way to change a belief system is to work on your head, the other is to go out and have an experience that destroys your belief system, says Robbins. Note again the aggressive destruction of beliefs. Rather than making beliefs more accurate, more flexible, or even recognizing the positive intent of old beliefs, Robbins has an appetite for destruction and nothing less will satisfy.

Frank had an amazing experience driving his truck in the desert. The risk of course was pretty high that he might injure himself again, something I find concerning in that the risks were not addressed in the show, but then again it at least was Frank’s choice this time.

Robbins, ever the showman, ends this spectacle with a recreation of their marriage ceremony.

“Step 7: Own Your Breakthrough”

Step 7 sounds more like Oprah than Robbins—”Own it girlfriend! Own your breakthrough!”

Again, symbolically, this was a great idea. Recreating the marriage in a celebration overwrites and creates anew the marriage Frank and Kristen wanted, while more fully integrating the experience of paraplegia. It doesn’t necessarily deal with some of the practical details however—for example how exactly to have kids? A winning attitude isn’t enough. They are now inspired but don’t have any practical information whatsoever. How to deal with catheters and other practical details of disability that Kristen was taking care of? These all-important practical details are swept away in the pathos of the spectacle.

“I can’t imagine anything holding us back anymore” says Kristen. While this is certainly a much more optimistic view of the future than before, it also has a tinge of the unrealistic. Clearly there will still be many more life struggles, struggles that will have to be faced without the budget or assistance of Tony Robbins’ reality TV show. It can actually be a very significant problem to not be able to imagine potential threats to one’s future, as then you won’t be able to think of and act upon potential solutions. This kind of breakthrough has little-to-no potential for lasting resourcefulness, and potentially could even lead to depression when faced with future challenges.

Recreating the wedding again was a beautiful and touching intervention, but not exactly something that could have easily been recreated without a huge budget. Weddings are extremely expensive!

Conclusions

What this show seems to imply is that one needs to have intense, aggressive, risky, and high-priced adventures or challenges in order to make a significant life change. Robbins says that experience is key to making changes, but then doesn’t offer anything practical in terms of realistic experiences one can have on a recession budget (cue sales pitch for his seminars!).

Meanwhile, therapeutic experiences can happen far more rapidly, not to mention cheaply and easily in the comfort of your own mind! Visualization, acting, painting, or other expressive arts can all be methods of brief therapy on a budget. Books on self-help Cognitive Behavioral Therapy are cheap, or free from the library, and will give far more practical advice on creating more accurate, less distorted beliefs.

At best, this show provides an inner reference that viewers can add to their creative imagination, identifying with the characters and thus living vicariously through their struggles and victories. At worst, it is inspiration porn, cheapening life’s struggles into entertainment for others, further encouraging unrealistic solutions and time-lines to dealing with the inevitable difficulties in life.

At the end, Kristen says “if I could go back in time to the moment in the pool, I would tell myself ‘it’s going to be OK! Everything will be ok. Because everything is OK.’” In fact, she just said what was needed in the first place to heal—not crazy experiences in Fiji, jumping out of an airplane, or an expensive live recreation of their marriage ceremony, but just a little self-love through visualization. Many brief therapy techniques do exactly that—visualize going back in time to a previous traumatic incident, see it from the 3rd person perspective, and tell yourself what you wanted to hear to comfort your old you. Processes like this can often be done for free or for the price of a single therapy session in 15 minutes or less (not 30 days and millions of dollars) and can get amazing results in healing from difficult experiences. Robbins knows this, as he is already familiar with these exact techniques from NLP for rapid change. (For example, here is a sample video of Steve Andreas working with a client with grief. Notice how this makes for really boring television in comparison!)

Robbins’ strength is in creating powerful positive experiences (i.e. highs). But do these experiences translate into positive resources that can help one navigate the highs and lows of life? I have argued already that they do not—like firewalking, skydiving and Murderball do not teach life skills. Such adventures are fun, touching, and memorable. Often they are addictive. In other words, they make for great entertainment. But these short-lived highs usually do not lead to effective change, persistent and flexible behavior, and a deep resourcefulness—and when they fail, Robbins and other self-help gurus tend to blame the victim rather than take responsibility for the ineffectiveness of their interventions.

Note that there is no followup, so there is no knowledge of whether this change lasted long-term. No doubt if there was a followup, it would continue to be framed in a reality TV Disney-like way, emphasizing what has worked and not the ongoing struggles of living with disabilities, despite making some progress and having some heavily financed adventures, courtesy of Mr. Robbins.

Will this television show make the world a better place? I’m concerned that it will probably do the opposite. I imagine someone becoming disabled and before giving any empathy, their friends or family saying, “Now don’t get discouraged—this is a great opportunity. I saw this show with Tony Robbins and this guy in a wheelchair jumped out of an airplane and ended up racing a car in the desert!” Robbins position as television show host strongly encouraged his show participants to go along with his agenda—a family member or friend would risk destroying a relationship if they pulled the same stunts haphazardly.

Even more than lack of inspiration, I think we have lack of empathy in our self-help fueled culture. The ideological positivity of self-help culture fuels that very empathy deficit, as Barbara Ehrenreich argues eloquently in her book Bright Sided (appropriately titled Smile or Die in the UK release). While the disabled and others encountering life challenges certainly need to be convinced that they can in fact do many things, this encouragement needs to be enveloped in empathy and addressing real human challenges—without the Hollywood budget and aggressive positivity. Personally, I’m not convinced that this is the Breakthrough that American television audiences really need.

What is this New Minimalism? A page called “less” on mnmlist summarizes the lifestyle philosophy:

Stop buying unnecessary things.
Toss half your stuff, learn contentedness.
Reduce half again.
List 4 essential things in your life,
stop doing non-essential things.
Do these essentials first each day, clear distractions
focus on each moment.
Let go of attachment to doing, having more.
Fall in love with less.

At first glance, who wouldn’t agree with this minimalist manifesto? Buying unnecessary things certainly is wasteful. Learning to be content and mindful and free of attachment—isn’t this what the Buddha taught? So is Babauta advocating joining a Burmese monastery, or becoming a forest-dwelling yogi in order to study the nature of one’s mind in seclusion?

From the FAQ on mnmlist Babauta writes that one adopts minimalism in order to “Clear away the noise so we can concentrate on inner peace, on spirituality (if we wish), on our thinking. As a result, there is more happiness, peace, and joy, because we’ve made room for these things.” So far this minimalist philosophy could have been the words of the Thai monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who is famous for encouraging Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to adopt non-violence as a tactic for his activism.

A minimalist 3-car garage

Looking a little deeper there are some curious things about this New Minimalism. A Google search brings up this article from Zen Habits—also written by Babauta—entitled A Guide to Creating a Minimalist Home. The picture accompanying the article looks straight out of Dwell magazine. A linked website describes this “minimalist” home:

The Orr House is an addition and remodel to a 5,080 square foot 1970’s stucco clad two-story home, built on a steep down-slope lot in semi-rural Saratoga, California.

Bathed in natural light from a skylight above, a new atrium brings natural light to the entry, the living room, a lower level tatami room and home office, and dramatically illuminates the stairs to the lower level and a beautiful mahogany bridge that spans the two-story space. The kitchen/dining area and the living area all share a beautiful new stone terrace, edged with cantilevered reflecting pool that extends the vistas to the horizon while minimizing views of the driveway below.

One of the most successful aspects of this project is the sensitive combining of the new and old to create a new design that is fresh, unique, beautiful to look at and beautiful to live in.

The contradictions are glaring. Babauta advocates for ridding one’s self of possessions in order to be free of debt among other things at the same time praising a 5,080 sq ft California mansion for its simplicity. On a blog post entitled consumerism vs. minimalism (lowercase letters are more minimalist), Babauta writes:

There is in most of us an underlying desire to buy cool stuff.

It stems from fears and insecurities, I think, but it is exploited by corporations and advertising. Advertising is designed to get us to desire more, to want to buy, and because it works so well, we end up buying way, way more than we need.

Minimalism is the exact counter to this phenomenon, and for some of us, it’s the answer.

…

The minimalist lets go of desires, slowly, so that she buys less and spends less, gets into less debt (or none at all), and as a result, needs to earn less and work less.

A quick search of homes in Saratoga, California over 5000 square feet shows prices of around $4 million. Your monthly mortgage payment for your minimalist home would run you upwards of $25,000, unless of course you could pay in cash, thus remaining debt-free. But the cool stuff is worth the price, right?

Is Neo-minimalism Just a Marketing Demographic?

Neo-minimalism isn’t exactly the Tightwad Gazette, and I’m not sure that purchasing a 5,000 square foot mansion is “a way to escape the excesses of the world around us — the excesses of consumerism, material possessions, clutter, having too much to do, too much debt, too many distractions, too much noise” as Babauta advocates. Perhaps this Neo-minimalism is just another consumer marketing demographic, an aesthetic popular amongst middle- and upper-class technophiles and hipsters. But then why the air of a political or moral movement to this lifestyle choice?

The kinds of homes Babauta praises—”the ones with almost nothing in them except some beautiful furniture, some nice artwork, and a very few pretty decorations, are the ones that appeal to most of us”—are not praised by all of us. The very popular Unhappy Hipsters blog mocks such homes as alienating and pretentious by giving satirical captions to photos from Dwell and similar magazines:

Babauta is an Apple fanboy, and until recently was an early adopter of using Google to store his emails, documents, and other files instead of using desktop software and hard drive space. Google and Apple are both high-tech consumer companies with a minimalist style. Is there anything inherently better—aka ethical—about this minimalist aesthetic?

When Babauta went “Google free” I retweeted and added that the problems of Capitalism are not solved by changing IT providers. He replied to me wondering if I had a better solution. I admitted that this is a complex question, but that my point was that Google did not invent ad creep or privacy concerns and thus switching to other companies will not solve the problems they didn’t cause.

Let The Poor Eat Minimalism

I saved my biggest concern for last, however. In an article attempting to address the claims (like mine above) that minimalism is only for the affluent, Babauta writes…

In fact, there isn’t a requirement for minimalism. You can invent your own version, and if you’re more worried about how to survive until the next paycheck (I’ve been there), then cutting back on the unnecessary will help you get there. Look for unnecessary expenses (like eating out, going to the movies, buying junk food snacks, or renting DVDs) and eliminate them, finding ways to have fun that are free.

Eliminating unnecessary possessions also means you’ll need a smaller home, which will save on rent and heating/cooling. Buying fewer things means less debt. Spending time with loved ones or doing things you love means you spend less. All of these things are good whether you’re wealthy or not.

It’s true that the poor are often thought of as not having the luxury of even thinking about simplifying, or minimalism. They’re too worried about putting food on the table, or where the rent is coming from, or how to avoid creditors until the next paycheck. And there’s a lot of truth in that. But it doesn’t have to be true: anyone can pause, breathe, and decide to live differently.

Anyone can make the decision to do without the unnecessary, to cut off cable TV, to consider doing without a car, to only buy what’s absolutely necessary and to rethink what’s necessary. I’ve been deep in debt, and I know the feeling of drowning with no way to get out. I got out, mostly because I cut expenses to the bone while looking for ways to increase income. Minimalism helped me to get out of debt, and to get out of poverty. It’s not just for the affluent anymore.

The message here is whether you are cutting back by living in a sparse 5,000 square foot mansion or deciding between electricity or food for your children, we can all embrace minimalism. It’s not unjust for society to be structured in such a way that one person has millions or billions of times more resources than another—it’s all good as long as we are all “living simply.” I imagine a future blog posts’ suggestions for poor minimalists:

Try eating every other day, or going without running water for a few months until you can save up enough to turn your utilities back on. You’d be amazed at how long one can go without food and water and still survive—in fact, it can be a downright spiritual experience!

The poor hardly need to be told that they should cut back in order to get ahead—every month they make impossible no-win choices in an effort to merely survive. The poor in developed countries are often eating the only food that they can afford—junk food which is loaded with calories but no nutrition. Saying they should cut back on junk food is asking them to starve. Meanwhile the “bottom billion” live on less than $1/day—not because doing so is more aesthetically appealing or a hip lifestyle choice, but because of the structural inequities that force them into such abject poverty, structural inequalities that make it possible for us relatively wealthy folk to be reading blogs on laptop computers and other gadgets. Notably, I have yet to find a minimalist who advocates for increasing taxes on the 1% most wealthy. The reason may lie in the “lack of requirements” (i.e. “lack of ethics”) of minimalism as stated—telling others what to do is the ultimate taboo.

While most people who read blogs online could probably save money by cutting back, this Neo-minimalism of the rich is clearly built upon the forced “minimalism” of the destitute. But those poor people are better off “living simply,” right? Without all the stuff we have, they must live lives of peace, contentment, and beautiful minimalist aesthetics. And if the poor don’t want to be poor anymore, they should declutter and stop buying unnecessary things to save money so that they can lift themselves up by their bootstraps…so that one day they too will have a minimalist mansion, sitting on a cream-colored couch reading minimalist blogs on their iPads.

A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley depicts an ordered society where humanity is tamed and controlled through the use of excessive pleasure.   This pleasure comes in the form of unlimited sex, a designer drug named “Soma,” and a caste system that designs people specifically for their social roles, eliminating unhappiness in the work force.  The society as a whole is conditioned to believe in a consistent set of values, primarily designed to keep everyone in line and the system of consumption functioning at a near perfect level of efficiency. Those are not fitting into society are encouraged to enjoy themselves by taking Soma, as its hallucinogenic and anti-depressant effects allow them to snap back into blissful conformity with ease.   In essence, Huxley dreamed of a world where unimportant pleasures distract us from the greater problems at hand, and in the case of the book these problems manifested as the sheer level of control and lack of freedom exerted over all of humanity by the system.

In the past few years, a phenomena known a social media has taken a strong hold on the minds of many internet users.  Individuals are encouraged to attain accounts with a variety of services such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, and others which allow them to attain large amounts of trivial information in a short amount of time.  Most of these services direct users out to Blogs, where users can interact with writers directly.  It is implied within the system of social media that information is “meant to be free,” that all opinions should be heard, and that censorship should be considered unethical.  Those who promote social media as a system suggest that the freedom of great amounts of information allow people to make more efficient connections with others, be more informed about the world, and make their lives better through what are known as “life hacks.”

A Match Made in Heaven or Hell?

Lifehacking as meme began its life when programmers were looking for simple ways to make their coding life easier, by instituting small hacks to the software.  Moving away from the strictly geek demographic, lifehacking has come to be known by a broad set of skills, habits, and ideologies which fit well into the field of personal development.  Within the idea of lifehacking, it can be seen that humans function as cybernetic organisms that can be “hacked” from their original operating systems to become more efficient or better suited to other perhaps more interesting tasks.  This often takes the form of what is known as “lifestyle design” which refers to the ability to design one’s life from the ground up, often in what is called a “non-conformist” way.  This romantic idea of programming one’s life in-turn gave life to the new age of personal development via social media sites like Digg and Reddit.  It can be easily seen how personal development and social media became quite well adapted to each other early on in their union.

Marketing the Father, Social Media the Son, and the Holy Positivity

Social media, the field of marketing, and the positive thinking movement have formed an unholy trinity of influence on the internet.  In many ways this trinity is a series of facades hiding a deeper core of persuasive marketing, without any valuable content within.  The field of marketing birthed the notion of social media, it was originally pitched as a tool for corporations and small businesses to more effectively reach their audiences in an age where anyone can write a negative view and post it for all to see.  While social media may have been marketed to be open in nature, the function of it has always been the dispersion of marketing messages. To consumers, social media promised the democratization of information, where individuals were put on the same rhetorical level as corporations, but in reality the shift of influence has always been in the hands of those with power, regardless of what technological means of sharing are used.  Thus social media sold the facade of “openness” to the consumers using buying into it, but offered new manipulative means of marketing to corporations and their amateur copycat shills.

Enjoy!

The most effective tool the field of marketing uses to distort messages is the notion of positive thinking.  The cult of positive thinking and personal development have had a long and profitable history together, and as a result it was only natural that positive thinking would cross the short divide between personal development and social media. Thus positive thinking formed the very fabric of the facade which prevented any critical discourse from occurring.  By promoting strictly positive attitudes, social media bloggers often censor and limit speech, all the while supporting the well-stated ideal of “openness.” One such example happened a few weeks ago when Duff McDuffee posted a comment on Chris Guillebeau’s blog regarding his shilling of Seth Godin’s new book, Linchpin.  Duff’s original comment:

The only book Godin wrote that didn’t have spin in the title was All Marketers are Liars.

If you’ve read a couple of Godin books, the rest are truly dispensable.

I’ll summarize his collected works: work hard, take risks, be different. Find creative ways to hype the crap out of your products. Reframe ordinary concepts to obfuscate and create a personal vocabulary that makes you look smart. Embrace high-tech. Write in a terse, cryptic style to sound profound, yet say nothing new.

Use the methods of grassroots political campaigns to sell stuff and make capitalism look like protest. Create phony “revolutions,” “manifestos,” political groups (”tribes”) etc. around B.S. “causes” which are really about selling stuff (thus making grassroots political organizing ineffective for actual, non-commercial causes).

In the end, I think Mr. Godin has done much more harm than good. All the “change” that is encouraged is more of the same.

Guillebeau censored this comment from his post, and then emailed Duff back in response:

It’s OK if Seth’s work isn’t for you, but you don’t need to be so rude about it.

This is a big day for him and I am thrilled to support the launch of a great book. The last thing in the world I would want to do is discourage someone who has helped so many people with his ideas, including me. I hope that instead of putting him down so harshly you can do something positive with your own work [emphasis mine].

This response from Guillebeau portrays him shocked as if to say “how dare you question me! Go enjoy yourself instead!”  This response is a common one among those who promote an authoritarian ideology of what is and is not acceptable speech within social media.  The attitude absolutely denies the value of criticism in order to ensure that the blogger’s marketing memes spread as smoothly as possible. Additionally, Guillebeau suggested Duff’s criticism was “rude,” this demonstrates an additional level of context about what is acceptable speech in social media.  This is coming from a man who claims to be “challenging authority since 1978″ and a “fighter of the status quo.” Yet Guillebeau censored comments that challenged his own status quo, this strikes me as quite hypocritical, and very typical of social media bloggers.  While it is an unstated social norm on blogs and twitter to comment only positively, this stems from the positive thinking movement which has thrived [ripped people off] in an arena free of criticism for decades.  Those deeply entrenched in social media almost feel as if critics will bring the whole pleasure party down, that critics would be better off out marketing their own products instead of bringing attention undesirable ideas.

Twitter is a Little Bit Distracting

One place where thousands of people have taken this to heart is the social network known as Twitter.  Twitter is a social media site where users can post short, 140 character messages known as tweets that their friends can receive notifications of.  Twitter allows users to follow individuals, and corporations in what often amounts to an overwhelming flood of interesting information.   No other social media site promotes the sheer amount of information enjoyment than twitter does.  People often become addicted to twitter, constantly refreshing looking for new blog posts to read, or tweeting to famous (or twitter-famous) people in the hope that will receive replies.  Twitter itself functions as a hotbed for random, mostly useless information which distracts and creates compulsive behavior in the human mind.

Many wannabe personal development, social media, and marketing gurus have taken to Twitter, proclaiming themselves “experts” in their chosen fields.  Tens of thousands of these people utilize auto-following bots, and spam techniques in a vain attempt to break through and become a guru themselves.  Because twitter is so easy to join and start posting information,  it has become a hotbed for people who have deluded themselves into believing they are experts.  They have literally taken the advice of bloggers like Chris Guillebeau to “do something positive with your own work.”  In some strange way, it seems many people view the most effective means of doing “something positive” as becoming a guru yourself. This only adds to the pleasurable, narcissistic noise that permeates social networks like Twitter.

Dogma and Karma

This surplus of distraction and the compulsive nature of human interaction with social media compares very well with the fears that Huxley portrayed in A Brave New World about a society tranquilized by pure pleasure.  When criticism comes up especially within the area of personal development, the response is often the suggestion to go enjoy oneself with some other distraction, instead of specifically looking at issues and problems that occur within the system.  Thus when marketing, social media, and positive thinking are combined, the result is a wide-spread authoritarian control of ideas within the social network. The most acceptable ideas are those who allow people or corporations to profit via marketing, and by extension the great network of supporting notions of this ideology.   This directly contradicts the common ideology of what social media means to the internet, people often rave about how it allows us so much more  freedom than we had before, however I believe this to be a simple myth of the system.

Fortunately, there is a solution to this hidden authoritarian censorship buried deep within the trinity of marketing, social media, and positive thinking.  The solution is to build a continual cycle of criticism within the social media environment. Criticism is a key part of the progression of thought, and as a result its general removal from social media and personal development has allowed things to spiral horribly out of control.  Not only is criticism necessary, but we have a responsibility to it, else we are just building systems of dogma under the guise of progression.  At that point, why bother?

Pink presents two kinds of radical changes to workplaces that increase intrinsic motivation: 20% time and the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE). 20% time is famously employed at Google, where employees get to work on whatever projects they want for 20% of their designated hours. This unusual work structure has been said to have given birth to many of the cool Google features many people love, such as Gmail. ROWE is an even more radical idea, which is that employees are given full autonomy to work whenever they want, from wherever they want, and meetings are optional. The only things that matter are getting results defined by the company.

Many blogs in the personal development/marketing sphere have covered ROWE and 20% time, usually very positively, and rarely covering any socio-cultural, economic, or political aspects of these ideas besides that of increased productivity. What would be the likely implications for society if such measures were much more widely implemented? How might they benefit society, and what potential risks or drawbacks would there be?

I consider these to be important questions for the future of personal development. Many people in developed nations cite work as their number one stress in life. Reducing stress and increasing meaningfulness of work would benefit many people, and could be a source of rich personal development. But these innovations in management could also have potentially negative downsides for the individual and society.

Much of the online personal development blog sphere is dedicated to finding meaningful work, usually through small-business entrepreneurship. Many buzzwords and catch phrases have been created to capture the spirit of doing what you love and getting paid for it, such as solopreneur, ittybiz, career renegade, the 4-hour workweek, black sheep, biggification, the art of nonconformity, and escape from cubicle nation. Most personal development bloggers are not seeking meaningful work within existing workplaces, but many are excited about 20% time and ROWE, as these business structures promise much of the same opportunities for autonomy, mastery, and purpose as entrepreneurship, without as much of the risk.

The Good

Dan Pink defines autonomy as “the urge to direct our lives,” mastery as “the desire to get better and better at something that matters,” and purpose as “the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.” These are self-actualization needs as defined by Abraham Maslow. It could hardly get better for human beings to have all of our basic needs met and to feel like we are contributing to society by doing what we most love.

20% time allows employees to work on what they find most interesting, bringing out creative ideas that we want to work on. No worker would rationally object to that. ROWE allows employees to work in ways that fit their energy levels and lifestyles (e.g. family life), while encouraging creative solutions to problems instead of just putting in your hours at the office. These strategies create conditions for the best of entrepreneurship to be enjoyed by employees of existing businesses.

ROWE and 20% time have been shown to be better for productivity and creativity, which if implemented generally would benefit the economy as well. Existing management that emphasizes extrinsic rewards is bad for creativity and productivity, as Pink argues.

External motivation creates massively unequal pay scales between the highest-paid executives and salesmen and the lowest-paid administrative and service workers. If intrinsic motivation was taken very seriously, there would be no rational justification to pay CEO’s thousands of times more than janitors and customer service workers. Indeed, more and more CEO’s, lawyers, and high-powered executives are quitting their financially lucrative jobs to find or create more meaningful and personally satisfying work (Jonathan Fields and Pam Slim are two great examples).

Taking intrinsic motivation seriously, it would be more rational to have salary caps and could lead to a more equitable distribution of wealth between rich and poor—or at least between rich and middle-class.

The Bad

On the other hand, since it is unproductive to motivate knowledge workers with financial rewards, owners and shareholders of companies might exert pressure to pay employees less and profit off of them more. Even though technically this is irrational behavior according to the intrinsic motivation theory, the structures of publicly traded corporations that require maximizing quarterly returns are not likely to change overnight. Companies will still legally be required to maximize profit, and paying employees less is an immediate boost to profit margins. In addition, people in power have throughout history acted irrationally to maintain their own selfish interests.

Seen in this light, 20% time could be a way for management to be not less but more authoritarian, managing not just external actions but internal feelings too, for the benefit of an elite minority. Getting slaves to love their slavery is the ultimate act of coercion. This would prevent any meaningful political changes. It is already difficult enough to organize a populace saturated in spectacle and infinite consumer distractions.

ROWE could create hypercompetition for low-paid but meaningful jobs, as currently is the case in the non-profit sector. ROWE could also exacerbate the ageist trend of firing higher-paid, older employees in exchange for young, results-producing and meaning-driven Gen Y workers.

If implemented by itself, ROWE might transfer business risk from owners to employees, like partners of a firm without any stock. Those who do not get results will get fired, even if they put in far longer hours but just had bad luck with their particular solution, or suffer from a medical condition like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. In countries like the United States that have little-to-no social net, this could create massive anxiety for individual employees, thus making work much more unpleasant. It could be potentially disasterous to get fired in a society with little social net where nearly all companies have ROWE, for companies would engage in even more fierce competition for the most productive employees, creating a kind of Social Darwinism.

Meeting all one’s needs in one workplace could create a corporate cult. Google’s campus has a cafeteria, gym, and even a Buddhist-inspired personal development center. Getting fired or laid off would be as devastating for the individual as being excommunicated from the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, losing all of one’s income, meals, friends, social network, meaningful activities, gym membership, and religious services all at once.

Hypercompetition of ROWE could encourage cheating and cutting corners not just by corporations, but also by individuals within corporations. On the other hand, lots of employees cut corners as it is. But with potentially less oversight by management, with fewer policies and procedures, what would stop someone from doing the minimum amount of work on a project? Or to put it another way, what kind of results will we value—short-term or long-term? High quality or low quality? Tim Ferris, ROWE supporter and author of the 4-Hour Workweek, is famous for cheating at martial arts. Is this the kind of result we want to encourage in business?

Some tasks and projects and even job roles are things that nobody in any society enjoys doing. I often wonder if very few job roles exist that are inherently meaningful and deeply fulfilling. Most people seeking meaningful work end up as some kind of Life Coach or Marketing Consultant. Working one-on-one with intelligent and creative people to help solve their problems and seeing results is much more meaningful for most people than working on problems that might never be solved, that deal in complete abstractions, that involve repetitive and monotonous tasks, or that require grueling physical labor.

There will still be need for manufacturing work and physical labor (unless we start mass-producing robots!), which is still best under the traditional management of external rewards. Increasing the meaningfulness of white-collar jobs may create an even larger wage and even meaning gap between white-collar and blue-collar jobs.

Accounting for the Social Costs of Intrinsic Motivation

Many of these potential costs of motivating employees with intrinsic motivation must be dealt with at a collective level, not simply by corporations or individuals. Here are some of my ideas as to potential solutions that could integrate such things as ROWE and 20% time while accounting for their potential problems.

Change the structure of publicly-traded corporations to eliminate the legal requirement for maximizing quarterly profits. This is of course a massive change but would be necessary to prevent against abuses of employees by owners. Whether or not we implement intrinsic motivation structures within business, I think this is an important step towards creating a more just and sustainable world.

Create a very solid social net. To prevent anxiety from hyper-competitiveness and to ensure basic needs of individuals are met, we need to ensure that sick and unemployed people are taken care of. If we can implement one radical idea like 20% time or ROWE, then we can implement other radical ideas like universal health care (hardly radical of an idea in most developed nations) and even guaranteed minimum income. These programs are best if publicly funded to prevent cannibalization from corporate entities. This extends the idea of “paying people adequately and fairly, then giving people lots of autonomy” to beyond a single workplace to society generally. Providing a guaranteed minimum income could create conditions for massive innovation and entrepreneurship.

Implement intrinsic motivation fully throughout society, from top to bottom—globally. This would result in a radical leveling of income from rich to middle class (the poor will likely still be involved in low-paid manufacturing, physical labor, and service jobs, which perhaps can be subsidized and given more external motivation with the excess revenue from capping salaries). Cap executive and management salaries across the board for all companies to some reasonable amount like $100k. This would make salaries consistent with both intrinsic motivation research as well as positive psychology research that shows diminishing returns for personal wealth above subsistence levels. While this may seem like a radical notion, reducing the income gap in this way would be the most rational course of action for our economy based on current psychological science. Our existing paradigm of economics is lagging far behind our understandings of what makes people happy and productive (unless there is other contradictory research I am not aware of). By reducing the wage gap, we will free up billions of dollars for paying employees living wages in developing nations.

It may even be more rational to pay employees much more for those meaningless jobs that require compliance and straightforwardness, since these jobs are the only ones apparently more productive with the use of extrinsic motivation. In a meaning-based economy, the meaningless jobs are the ones that are rational to reward financially. This of course contradicts the “do what you love and get paid oodles of $$$ for it” philosophy of most Life and Marketing Coaches, which is irrational based on the psychological research Dan Pink has presented.

Revive local communities and the public sphere. To avoid the corporate cult that enslaves employees by controlling their social and religious lives, we need non-commercial local communities that are rich with social connections and meaningful activities once again. Online communities play some role in an individual’s life, but nothing like flesh-and-blood social networks that used to bond individuals for life. Since many jobs will probably always lack intrinsic meaningfulness, community is a strong requirement for finding that connection and sense of purpose. Positive psychology research has also shown that meaningful work is far less important to living a meaningful and happy life than we often think, while intimate relationships and community make a much bigger difference. Perhaps if we implemented lower salaries, we could have much higher taxes on corporations, making available large funds for public works and common spaces for community to form once again.

Changing these structures would require mass political and social action, as well as an enormous shift in how we think about motivation. In fact, these changes would take no less than a revolution, since they would massively overthrow existing power elites and radically restructure society and economics. Whether you agree with my conclusions or not, the implications of research on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation certainly have very significant implications for society and culture.

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What are the consequences of using such a technique on the individual, on culture and society, and on the planet? What are alternative ways to cultivate one’s mind and emotions that lead to beneficial outcomes without the self-centeredness and inflation of such techniques?

Affirming what you want in positive, present tense language, over and over is a foundational technique of personal development found in self-help classics such as Think and Grow Rich, repeated in endless variations in books and blogs. Intensely affirming one’s desired outcomes—often for greed-based goals—amplifies the already self-focused tendency of the mind. Such affirmations end up being a version of the “what about me?” mantra that most of us say all day long already:

This touching music video is from the Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, a Tibetan Lama and lineage holder of Shambhala Buddhism, and son of Chogyam Trungpa. In this poem, he says…

“In fact, it’s embarrassing. I say this mantra all day long.”

Rather than feel embarrassed by our self-centeredness, much of the popular literature of personal development celebrates our “what about me?” mantra, encouraging us to cultivate shameless samadhi in our daily practice of narcissism. Sitting in front of the shrines dedicated to our selves (aka “vision boards”), we worship our own egos by repeating me-mantras and visualizing ourselves as all-powerful deities that create our own universes. We seek immortality not through great works of anonymous service, but by staining the world with our obnoxious, self-centered “personal brands.”

Our self-help gurus are those who successfully repeat this “what about me?” mantra louder, more often, and without any embarrassment whatsoever. In fact, they take pride in their “success” at being so entirely self-focused and achievement-obsessed.

This ability to inflate the self to God-sized proportions is a key qualification for any personal development guru, or in fact most of the celebrated figures in our celebrity culture. Many of the key techniques of personal development aim at inflating the self to the size of the universe, the inverse of the traditional religious aims of dissolving the self, seeing that the self is illusory, or engaging in selfless service. Rather than surrendering to a higher power, the aim of most personal development is to become a higher power, perhaps to fill the void that is left in a culture where “God is dead.” The aim of developing massive personal power—despite empty words to the contrary—is clearly about having social and economic power over others, and to be celebrated for one’s narcissism in a vacuous celebrity culture.

The solution is not necessarily to always attempt to make others happy before one’s self, as seems to be recommended in the above video. This can easily become martyrdom, which is just as much an ego-trip as only affirming one’s own goals. But I hope you can agree that there is an enormous difference between affirming “may I be happy and free from suffering” with humility and courage, and affirming “I deserve massive wealth” with puffed-up enthusiasm—even if we can’t always congruently wish for the happiness of all beings.

I am not opposed to an individual practicing the mantra or affirmation “may I be happy” or “may I be free of suffering”—these are very useful tools, and usually recommended as first steps within Buddhist practice for generation of joy and compassion before practicing compassion for others. Nor do I necessarily see any problem with deciding on an outcome or goal and infusing it with some energy, and reminding yourself of the goal at regular intervals. However, every religious tradition involves regularly praying for the well being of others. By contrast, most personal development only recommends praying for one’s individual desires. Meanwhile, the evidence from positive psychology suggests that the main keys to our happiness come from being deeply connected with others, and clearly our excessive self-focus is eroding those very connections more and more.

What happens to a culture and society when we consciously and deliberately invest enormous energy and focus on our selfish aims? Personally, I think we get a lot of our present culture, and the problems within it. We get a culture that is blind to culture, that ceases to ask ethical and social questions, and that reduces political action to consumer choice. We get a culture where a great number of people are unhappy and seeking ways to become happy, and we get solutions that make people more unhappy by encouraging them to be even more self-focused.

Personal development can certainly occur without cultivating inflation and narcissism, but doing so looks quite different from our popular images of success and achievement, and utilizes techniques that are more precise and often more focused on others than conventional advice from the narcissistic gurus.

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What happens when a whole society of people learns to project an image of success and capability that few members of that society actually possess? Let us create for ourselves an imaginary world – we’ll call it Youtopia – and explore what might happen there.

But first, let’s consider why we might want to project such an image. Personal development enthusiasts regularly teach that projecting such an image will actually make us more capable and successful. Fake it ‘til you make it. The technique works because self-image can be a powerful motivator. It changes how we feel about ourselves and how others feel about us as well. We might begin this process being incapable and unsuccessful, but that changes as we begin to project a new image of ourselves.

In a socially mobile society like that of the US, in which individuals craft their own lives for themselves and must regularly recreate their own social worlds as they move from place to place and from one social class to another, the ability to project an image of success and capability can mean the difference between success and failure in almost any endeavor. So let us travel to Youtopia and see what happens when all of us do this?

First of all, it becomes difficult to distinguish who is actually successful and capable on Youtopia. For everyone will appear successful and capable whether or not he or she really is. And while new indicators of success and capability might be discovered, those indicators would be quickly learned by others on YouTopia, for if everyone possessed the ability to project an image of success and capability, whatever the indicators of success and capability were, they would learn them.

So there will be confusion regarding who is really successful and capable on Youtopia, and in this confusion many people will be promoted to positions they are incapable of succeeding in. What’s more, since investors will also believe the people working in businesses they might invest in are more capable and successful than they really are, they will tend to over invest.

But the investors will also believe one another to be more capable and successful than each of them really is. And investors regularly emulate the decisions of other investors they believe to be successful and capable. So, they will each tend to further over value the businesses they might invest in based on signals they read from one another. Youtopia is beginning to look a lot like the American bubble economy that grew more and more bubbles – dotcoms, housing, finance – as the message of personal development gurus became more integral to business in it.

But we should not ignore the role of the entrepreneur. Insofar as she is capable of projecting an image of success and capability she does not possess, she will be given signals from others that she is more capable and successful than she really is. After all, this is one of the reasons projecting such an image works. Hence, she will be much more likely to start a business she is not capable of succeeding in. And since this would be the same for all entrepreneurs in this personal development utopia, they will all be starting businesses that are unlikely to succeed. And of course, investors will also over value their own capabilities. And this will contribute to them over investing in these over valued businesses.

But as we delve more deeply into this Youtopia of self-esteem, something strange begins to happen. Everyone becomes more successful. More businesses are started, and more money is invested. The higher growth in the economy even brings in more tax dollars for social programs. The problem is that, as we have so recently learned with the housing and financial crash, wealth that rests on an ephemeral cloud of illusions is inflation. And inflated bubbles sooner or later pop.

So long as it is just a small percentage of the population that is capable of projecting an image of success and capability that they don’t yet possess, the technique will tend to be successful for them, providing self-esteem and opportunities. The impact on the economy will be negligible. And the individuals capable of projecting such an image will actually empower others to take control of their own minds.

But the closer we approach to a universalization of this ability, the more the ability to project an image of success and capability becomes a prerequisite to achieving anything in the world. It becomes a social survival skill, like the ability to suppress a fart in public. But suppressing farts in public actually does make everyone better off.

Once this ability to project a false image of ourselves is universalized, we all must learn to do it in the same way that members of court used to have to learn elaborate social graces to maintain their positions. And while those social graces or the ability to project a false image of one self can still have some benefits once it has been universalized, those benefits will be few.

When everyone learns to project an image of success and capability they may not yet possess, we as a society lose the ability to comprehend the people around us. Thus, we will experience some loss of community and increase in anomie and social alienation. It becomes easier for people to deceive us in many ways as well. And because it is easier, they are more likely to. So, the problem is not only that many will start businesses they are incapable of running and that those businesses will tend to be staffed with unqualified employees and that they will then be over invested in, thereby creating bubbles in the economy. Those businesses will tend more and more to sell worthless goods in an effort to deceive a public that is confused by the signals they are reading in others. Does this sound familiar?

Of course, people the world over have in all periods of history attempted to project images of capability and success that were not actually true. But there have been few societies as socially mobile as that of the US. So, there is a stronger incentive to project this image here. And perhaps for this reason it has so recently become an art. That personal development gurus have escaped the crisis in American capitalism unscathed is a wonder. For their arts have been integral to the business culture in which an economy of bubbles could grow to ripeness.

Theo Horesh is a social entrepreneur and freelance writer living in Boulder, Colorado.

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