The Mythical Joneses

Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long, and in the end it's only with yourself.
- Mary Schmich

There is an interesting history behind the idea of keeping up with the Joneses here in America. As the industrial revolution progressed, and people began moving from farms into cities, everyone began living a lot closer together. With this newfound closeness also came a little more nosiness. Now people were more and more interested in what their neighbors did with their money, and soon this arrangement increased competition.

World War 2 changed a lot however, as the able-bodied men went off to war, and the women went to work doing their jobs. Perhaps more than any other time in our history, the people in America embraced cooperation, and banded together to fight the war at home while the soldiers did battle overseas. I remember reading a very poignant essay on similar occurrences in England, where people reported feelings of euphoria despite the war raging around them. Social psychologists attributed these feelings to the breakdown of the social classes, and how being freed from these restraints seemed to dramatically increase feelings of happiness despite the horrific nature of the war itself

A strange thing happened after the war ended however, as Americans in particular were now more prosperous then ever. The advertising industry seized on this newfound sense of prosperity, and began convincing people to buy things they didn’t need, often pairing products with famous celebrities to accentuate the point. With the proliferation of new media came more and more advertisements. Suddenly all of our newfound motion picture heroes were being paired with things to buy. It was effective.

And so the die was cast. America crossed the Rubicon in the 40’s and 50’s and we haven’t been back since. The early seeds of equating our value with what we owed were planted during these years, and it is a pattern that had become even more deeply entrenched in the decades since World War 2.

So we’ve come to measure our personal value on how well we fit in. That is the essence of the idea of belonging. and in America belonging is often measured by the quantity of a person’s possessions, and also how many of these possessions are also owned and appreciated by our neighbors. It’s a vicious circular game without a clear beginning, middle, and end.

In a nutshell then, advertisers have seized on one of the most basic and primal human needs, which is the need to feel a sense of belonging. This is problematic in many ways, and has caused a gulf in our society that often is demoralizing to a person’s self-esteem, when they have neither the means nor the opportunity to purchase the things required for membership.

So what is the solution? In working with a number of families over the years I have discovered that parents are often in a seemingly no-win situation. They try to instill in their children the idea that they are not defined by their possessions, but meanwhile the pressure to have what the other kids have is a powerful force instilled in children from a very early age. To often the guilt a parent feels with the idea that they are contributing to their kid being different makes them give in and play the game.

Somewhere along the way, if we are to get out of this trap, we have to wander off this path onto the road less traveled. This is a difficult fork in the road, as most of us are socialized in a million different ways to associate success with the acquisition of possessions. In a fascinating article entitled “Why the self is empty” Phillip Cushman makes the argument that we fill up our empty selves by buying things. Who among us has not relieved some temporary bit of suffering by purchasing something we didn’t really need? My guess is almost all of us. This is a pattern that helps us avoid dealing with legitimate suffering, which Cushman argues is an important piece of individual growth.

In making this deviation from consumerism, we often have a dark night of the soul. When we for a minute shed our materialistic coping methods we are left looking into a strange abyss, and this is where we have an opportunity for self-exploration. In many cases we have to unlearn a lifetime of programming that has led us to measure our happiness against our friends and neighbors. Ultimately this is a rope we have to let go of to truly journey down the road of self-exploration.

I include this essay in this book because through my work with people of every socio-economic class, I have noticed that a great deal of what makes someone feel like a substitute person originates with deeply conditioned ideas about how we compare to the people around us. Virtually everyone has felt they were missing something everyone else seemed to be getting, but for substitute people this is a feeling that can rest on their shoulders for a lifetime.

This can be a difficult moment in therapy, as we are taught that finding belonging is an important piece of feeling socially interested in others. As we individuate we must balance this need to belong while also weighing what this belonging may cost us. Perhaps before we can come back to others we have to truly spend some time alone with ourselves and emerge from this alienation with a more secure sense of self. We often mistake being alone with loneliness, and combat this loneliness by buying things to make us feel closer to the imaginary herd.

I would like to close this essay by sharing a story that happened to me last Christmas, while I was barricaded for two solid days in the Seattle airport due to extreme weather conditions. I hadn’t been home for Christmas in years, and this was the year I decided to break the streak. I avoided coming home in part because Christmas stirred up a number of my own substitute feelings, and, like I suspect happens in many households over the holidays, I dreaded playing the “let’s compare our lives” game with friends, family, and everyone else.

But this year things were going well, I was a therapist, had written books, and was scheduled to appear on Television later that month to talk about one of my books. A part of me wanted to go home again as a successful guy with good things to say about my life. I put on a nice suit and flew out of a freezing cold Chicago evening into what I hoped were greener pastures.

But I was wrong.

It so happened Seattle was having one of their worst snowstorms in a century. As I got off my plane, I heard the announcement that all the planes that night had been grounded for the evening. We were told to return to the lobby and check back in with the counter to figure out when our next flights would be leaving.

What I saw when I exited the terminal was a sea of humanity unlike any I had ever seen. There before me were thousands of people lying all over the place of every shape, size, age, race, and creed. I was demoralized. I looked at the line and it went on for hundreds of yards, snaking around over and over again. I reluctantly lugged my very large bag to the end of the line. I was in that line for nearly 24 hours, which, taken at face value, would appear to be one of the most torturous things a traveler could ever experience. It wasn’t. What occurred next was one of the most interesting sociological developments that I have ever had the pleasure of observing.

I sized up the people next to me in line. A family of hillbillies with plastic bags. A couple of dorks that looked like insurance salesmen. A lady that looked like she had just got out of a Honky Tonk after drinking for 3 straight days. Jesus. This was going to be the longest day of my life.

No one spoke for the first hour as we all began to get a sense of what we were in for. Finally I broke the ice and made a small joke, and everyone seemed eager to do a little venting. I busted out a bottle of wine I was bringing home for Christmas, thinking that somehow we needed it more now. Someone else produced some snacks, and soon we had a regular little party going on.

And all those judgments that went through my head? They were wrong. These people seemed to be incredibly nice and I had clearly misjudged them. What had happened here? How and why had a bunch of strangers decided to become some fast friends? What was the psychology behind this?

As I pondered these questions I came to the conclusion that most of it had to do with the fact that in this time, in this place, none of us were any more important than the other. We were all simply wayward travelers stranded together in the middle of a snowstorm, and for those 24 hours all hints of difference in social class had been dissolved. It was one of the greatest 24 hours I ever spent actually, as I truly got to know dozens of people in line as we continued to laugh and tell stories about our shared predicament. It never came up that I was a therapist, to them I was simply, “suit guy”, who was every bit as stranded as they were. I don’t think I’ve ever continuously laughed more than I did that day, and as we finally got to the front of the line, a kind of melancholy seemed to settle over our entire group.

The silence was broken by a young Goth-looking girl who was traveling with her mother. From talking to her I found out her parents were divorced and that she was going home to see her grandparents for the first time in many years. She was about 13, and talked to me about how she didn’t fit in very well at school, and also about her sense of relief about having a few weeks away from the kids who teased her.

“I have a question”, she asked. “What’s going to happen when we all have to go back home?”

It was a brilliant question that ran much deeper in my mind than the obvious answer regarding exchanging emails and phone numbers. We had become our own little Breakfast Club here in this airport, and as we got to the end of the line, it was clear she was feeling particularly sad that life was simply going to return to normal when we parted company. How had we created this belonging, and why was it so fleeting? Why did it take a 12 inch snowstorm in Seattle for this little girl to feel a true sense of belonging for perhaps the first time in her entire life?

These were questions I couldn’t totally answer, but now nearly a year later it is still a question I ask myself nearly every day. Why do we maintain our distance from people through social status when it seems to make everyone so unhappy? How do we unshackle ourselves from these conventions? In thinking about this question, I did in fact get everyone’s contact information, and have kept in touch with them faithfully ever since. On the night of my big TV appearance I emailed my teen-aged friend and told her I wanted to say hello, and asked her how I looked on the big screen. Although we all said goodbye that evening, we have kept this feeling alive with a little extra work. It is a lesson that will stay with me forever.