Spend and Acquire, Rapid Social Change and Information Overload

The Ancestral Mind: Reclaim the Power
by Gregg Jacobs, Ph.D.

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Spend and Acquire

Today, some three hundred years into the industrial (and now postindustrial) economy, the old adage that "money can't buy happiness" still gets lip service, but the Thinking Mind doesn't seem to be paying attention. More and more, our identities have come to be directly defined by what we own.

Harvard University economist Juliet Schorr, author of The Overspent American, has described the phenomenon of the "new consumerism," which equates contentment with acquiring material goods.6 With advertising and global competition setting the pace, we find ourselves on a treadmill of earn and spend, earn and spend. And because we are spending and acquiring more, we must work harder than ever before. Americans now devote more time to their jobs than any other nation except Japan. Two-income families have become the norm, and one study of married, dual-income couples found that the amount of time involved in working has risen almost seven hours a week over the past twenty years.7

It is not uncommon for parents today to work twelve or more hours per day, never seeing their children except on weekends. As a result, America has become, according to Harvard pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton, the least child- and family-oriented society in the world. Dr. Brazelton blames materialism and acquisitiveness, both the provenance of the TM, for parents' not knowing their children and the children not knowing their parents.8

In fact, even the power of the old adage about money and happiness may be fading away entirely. When Americans were asked in a national survey what they believed would improve their quality of life, "more money" was the most frequent response, and the more the better. In a survey of a quarter million students entering college, 75 percent of the respondents reported that it was very important or essential that they become very well off financially and that a very important reason for going to college was to make more money. Among nineteen listed objectives, becoming very well off financially placed number one, outranking goals such as developing a meaningful philosophy of life, helping others, and raising a family.9

And yet, in a survey of eight hundred college alumni, those who professed similar values-that is, those who preferred a high income and occupational success and prestige to having very close friends and a fulfilling marriage-were twice as likely as their former classmates to describe themselves as "fairly" or "very" unhappy.10 Recent studies by Dr. Richard Ryan and Dr. Tim Kasser, professors of psychology at the University of Rochester and Knox College, respectively, found that people for whom affluence is a primary focus tend to experience a high degree of anxiety and depression, a lower sense of well-being, and greater behavioral and physical problems.11 Seduced by the TM's attraction to material trappings, these people have subscribed to distorted values that can actually make them sick. Affluence itself is not the problem, but rather, living a life in which affluence is the focus. Extrinsic goals such as money and material possessions cut us off from elements of the Ancestral Mind that are crucial for well-being, values such as social relationships and the ability to be at peace with ourselves.

Psychologist David Myers and his colleague Dr. Ed Diener, who have studied the relationship between subjective well-being and affluence, summarize the situation this way: Having basic necessities like food and shelter is essential to well-being, but once people are able to afford life's necessities, increasing levels of affluence have a surprisingly weak effect on happiness. In their words, "Wealth, it seems, is like health: Its absence can breed misery, yet having it is no guarantee of happiness."12 According to Myers, the number of people reporting themselves as very happy has declined slightly over the past forty years.13 Writing in the journal American Psychologist, he notes that we are twice as rich and no happier, while the divorce rate has doubled, teen suicide tripled, reported violence almost quadrupled, and depression rates have soared, particularly among teens and young adults. Compared to their grandparents, today's young adults grow up with much more affluence, slightly less happiness, and much greater risk of depression. Myers terms this conjunction of material prosperity and social recession the "American paradox," and concludes that the modern American dream has become "life, liberty, and the purchase of happiness." He describes this fixation as the "greening of America," not in the familiar sense of environmental "green," but in the sense of "greenbacks."

The point of this book is not to question your economic aspirations. But we cannot ignore what is now an established medical fact: the more people deviate from the things that are important to the Ancestral Mind, such as close social ties and altruism, and the more they strive for extrinsic goals of the TM, such as money, the less robust their well-being.

Rapid Social Change and Information Overload

Western society, based as it is on the Thinking Mind, thrives on individualism. We exalt the self, in part because individualism, when expressed in the form of "getting ahead," is profitable and powerful. But placing too high a value on individualism can also lead to alienation from others, and even alienation from the self. The premium we place on individualism, and the mythology that has built up around it, makes us willing to uproot ourselves at the drop of a résumé, breaking off relationships with people and places, in pursuit of professional advancement.

Increasingly, the structural underpinnings of our lives are subject to change. In fact, the nature of work and family, and most of our assumptions about gender roles, have been transformed in a single generation. The career-long commitment to a single company, followed by a set pension, is a thing of the past. Our extended families, and sometimes even our nuclear families, are far less integral to our daily existence. And while all but the staunchest conservatives applaud the greater opportunities for women in the workplace and for men in the home that have emerged in the past thirty years, the transition has not been stress-free. For many, the overall rate of change has led to no small degree of confusion, disorientation, and social isolation.

Dr. Barry Schwartz, a psychologist at Swarthmore College, believes that, as well as the disruptions wrought by constant change, the degree of choice in modern life also has become excessive.14 Anyone who has tried to order telephone service lately would have to agree. Thirty years ago you'd call "the phone company" and choose a plan, and that was that. Now we're all bombarded with solicitations from a dozen different telephone providers, both long distance and mobile. How about ordering coffee in Starbucks? Or a cup of tea almost anywhere? ("We have Darjeeling, English Breakfast, chamomile, Pink Spice, Tutti Frutti, and Secret Sin.") Or a salad in a restaurant? ("Would you like French, Roquefort, Ranch, Creamy Italian, or our own special house dressing...dressed or on the side?") Nothing is simple anymore.

We often applaud the fact that religious, ethnic, and gender barriers to mate selection are quickly disappearing, as are gender barriers in the workplace. But as psychologists Robert Woolfolk and Paul Lehrer of Rutgers and Rutgers Medical School point out, along with the array of choices we have in modern life comes an imposing set of responsibilities.15 For example, we have more freedom than ever before to choose where to live, what career to pursue, whether or not to marry, whether or not to have children, whether to have them early or late, or raise them in traditional or nontraditional arrangements. It is also easier than ever to get married and divorced. The Thinking Mind not only sets up these choices but tempts us with a technological fix should nature not cooperate when, as many couples discover, choosing to put off childbearing means problems with fertility. Couples must choose again-in vitro fertilization, donor egg, any number of other modalities-and yet these remedies don't always work. The psychological anguish this entails, not to mention the expense, has ended many a marriage.

There is no mystery attached to the fact that, in this new era in human history, when for the first time large numbers of people can live unconstrained lives involving high levels of choice, there is a concurrent explosion in depression rates. The burden of responsibility for making innumerable choices can result in a person's becoming psychologically tyrannized by them.

© 2003 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Gregg D. Jacobs, Ph.D., is assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, senior research scientist at Harvard's Mind/Body Medical Institute, a research scientist at the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at Harvard Medical School, and the author of Say Goodnight to Insomnia.