The Secret To Happiness
Last night, I watched the movie Julie/Julia. For me it was a shining example of what’s wrong with our current culture and why people are so miserable. For those who haven’t seen it, the movie is a juxtaposition of two lives. A thirty-year-old blogger in New York who, in one year, cooked every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering The Art of French Cooking, and of Julia Child’s twelve-year-journey to create the cookbook. The movie highlights the differences between two paradigms: our current system-dependent, consumer culture versus a model that focuses on personal fulfillment, discovery and self-reliance, and how the models differ markedly in producing happiness.
Julie is a woman of 30, lost, self-centered, blocked and miserable. She is the epitome of the unhappy, dependent consumer and part of the unfortunate Self Esteem generation, a monstrous creation of parents my age. When we went to school in the sixties and seventies, all the emphasis and attention was on the boys and high-achievers and the rest of us were pretty much ignored or maligned. Our parents were more interested in cocktail parties than parenting. So many of us came out of the school system feeling alone with low self-esteem. We thought over-involving ourselves in our kids’ lives would help build self-esteem and would help them accomplish more. We thought that by giving our kids trophies for “participating” we’d make them feel good about themselves. We thought shoving them into endless Chinese lessons and ballet lessons would make them accomplished. We thought by tethering ourselves to our kids via cell phones and helping them make all their decisions would make them strong.
What we didn’t realize is that we undermined them more. We became a hyperextension of an already flawed paradigm. We reinforced the idea that kids can’t do things on their own. We gave them a skewed version of accomplishment. We gave them inaccurate mirrors of reality. We forgot that our children are individuals with unique talents and gifts that they need to learn to explore on their own. They need to be free to make and learn from their own mistakes. They need to be encouraged and supported in their interests. Not our interests and wants. Not what our consumer-driven, dependency-oriented society wants.
As a result, our kids are even more unprepared for reality than we were. All we’ve done is create an entire generation of deluded people who can’t solve problems on their own. Like Julie.
Julie wrote a half of a novel and because she couldn’t sell it, she never finished the book. She quit because she didn’t get an “A” for participating. For the first time in her life, she faced the real world. She ended up with the message that if you try once and don’t succeed and your parents can’t fix it for you, give it up. This illustrates the basic problem with our society today: the emphasis on dependence on the system. The message that we can’t do anything ourselves. The emphasis on buying something rather than creating it.
We no longer celebrate long-term efforts. Everyone wants to get rich quick. Julie is an example of this. She didn’t go to cooking school. She didn’t work forty hours a week for twelve years writing a book. She spent one year cooking and working a dead end job and whining about it on her blog. And this is what got her a book and movie deal. Why? Because this “accomplishment” resonated with her audience. Many people who saw the film couldn’t see difference between Julie and Julia Child.
Consumption is being mistaken for accomplishment. Which is how a “celebutard” like Paris Hilton has become famous. If you’ve never accomplished something like writing a book, you have zero understanding of the grit, determination and astounding amount of energy and hours it takes. Julie had little appreciation for the work Julia Child did. All she did was whine at the end of the story about how Julia Child wouldn’t recognize HER accomplishment.
Unfortunately, our current culture is producing far more Julies than Julias. It was recently reported that in America, 70% of people are dissatisfied with their lives and jobs. This is because we have ignored the fundamentals of human fulfillment. There is only one way to happiness: discovering your unique gifts and working hard to turn those gifts into mastery, completion and accomplishment.
Because we’re socialized to be consumers, not creators or initiators, America is in decline. We are stuck in a parent/child paradigm with the underlying message that if we’re good girls and boys and follow all the rules and trust in the system, we’ll be taken care of until the day we die. As a result, we have vast numbers of unemployed people waiting for someone to come along and give them a job. They aren’t thinking about creating a new job for themselves or others. They’re waiting for someone to come along and save them. And as most of us have started to realize, no one is coming to our rescue. We’ve been sold a false bill of goods. We are being called upon to take care of ourselves outside the system and we haven’t been given the tools to do it. Which is making us all terrified and miserable.
The movie illustrated this concept perfectly. Julie was whiny, fearful, unhappy and had complete meltdowns during her “year of accomplishment.” Julia Child laughed and loved her way through her entire life. Sure she had setbacks, but she just got up, dusted herself off and got back to work again with a smile on her face and joy in her heart.
We have the power to change our way of thinking. Our country was founded and built by a nation of Julias. And we can be great again. Celebrate your unique gifts. Develop them and share them. Believe in yourself, be in your corner and work hard for what you want. Your happiness and the future of this country depends on it.
©2010, Janet Periat
Tags: consumer culture, empowerment, Julia Child, Julie/Julia, unemployed
March 24th, 2010 at 12:02 pm
Well said, JP!
March 25th, 2010 at 10:52 am
That is some serious crap, all right! (in _your_ blog tag’s sense, not in a snarky sense). I saw the movie and thought it was entertaining (tho fluffy)… believe it or not, even a jaded anti-capitalist like me missed the whole consumer versus innovator angle. (Maybe because I saw it in the theatre with my parents…) But when you write it up this way, it’s as clear as day.
Your post here does make me think about my own job/career strategy. There have been many times when I forged ahead on my own — like joining the Peace Corps — but my current strategy does seem like I’m waiting for a white-knight to hand me a job and rescue me. It’s hard, with big debts, of course. Regardless of how you accumulated debt or how you’re going to repay it, there is basically no way to repay a fiscal debt that doesn’t involve some significant amount of subservience and humiliation. I think that’s just the nature of the beast. So one reason that Americans are kept in a consumerist, stunted culture is because our entire economy revolves around taking on more debt. Did you read my recent blog post (under my pseudonym) talking to people who’d been foreclosed-on? Click on some of the links I linked to in the latter half of that piece.
(Continued, I don’t think the blogger accepts such a big comment)
March 25th, 2010 at 10:53 am
I take it to heart when you and Frank expound on this theme, that everybody can be successful as a creator and an innovator… but often I have a hard time thinking it’s realistic. We live on a finite patch of land with 307,006,550 other Americans. All of us need to put food on the table and heat our homes. Satisfying those two needs alone (to say nothing of other common needs) mandates a huge amount of repetitive, baseline work — in other words, a system. Not every single one of the 307,006,550 of us can be a totally unique, innovative genius. Most of us have to spend a lot of time doing lowest-common-denominator work. There’s no way we can all stand elbow-to-elbow doing the same drudge work without some kind of organized system and hierarchy. I agree with you that the resulting system should be as minimally intrusive as possible, but I just don’t think that everybody can always escape from it. Escape should be the goal, but fulfilling that goal is gonna wind up being the exception, not the rule.
Right now for pleasure reading, I’m in the middle of an interesting novel about how hard it is to maintain your individuality in a crowded, technological, interdependent, entertainment-saturated country. A lot different novel from other treatments of this theme.
On the other hand, even though I’m dirt-poor and insolvent right now, I like to think that I create my own wealth. I do interesting things, I’m never bored, and I still have the freedom to set my own agenda (even though my agenda choices are often sharply limited). More Americans ought to look at that as “wealth”, but nevertheless, we spend a lot of time paying the bills.
PS: Just read your column “Debunking American Myths” in the Funny Times, left a comment on your blog under that entry. Congrats again!
March 25th, 2010 at 8:22 pm
I have two kids: same gender, same upbringing, same genes. One is your epitome of Julie and the other of Julia. I wonder what gives?
March 30th, 2010 at 11:56 am
Walnut:
I agree that we need a system and that there’s a lot of drudge work that needs to be done. However, that does not preclude finding your own unique gifts and developing them. A unique gift could be with plumbing or baking or building bridges. I think if we each followed our interests, everything would get done. Also, if you’ll notice my other point, it takes hard work. You will have to do a whole bunch of stuff you don’t want to do to make your dreams come true. Following your passion doesn’t mean you don’t put food on the table and clean up after yourself and pay the bills and take care of the kids. It means you explore and develop your gifts. And do everything else, too. It ain’t easy. But it’s worth it. I mean, what else are we doing here?
And for someone like you, you were given some amazing gifts. You are a fantastic writer. And it would be a pain in the ass to make that work as a job, but in the end, if you could make your living as a writer, isn’t that better than some job that doesn’t utilize your full potential?
Not everyone was given the kind of brains you have. Let someone of less intelligence do the menial work. You are destined for better things.
IMHO. Big hugs to you, my friend, Janet