The Exhausting Pressure to Self-Actualise

‘In psychology, a concept regarding the process by which an individual reaches his or her full potential’.

I’ve been thinking about self-actualisation and the potent cocktail it forms when mixed with late stage capitalism and social media platforms like Instagram. We are all influencers now, perhaps only with a reach of a handful of people each, as there’s simply not enough people to go round for us all to have large followings. But we are all selling something now, even if it is just the illusion that our lives are glamorous and exciting. What seems most sinister to me is the extent to which we have begun to distil our dreams in order to have something palatable to drip feed out into the waiting mouths of said followers. It is true there are lots of hungry mouths and endless hours of attention to feed but there are also so many waiting teets, often filled with high velocity, sugary, sexy content, against which, we with our little projects and dreams cannot compete. So now we are starting to adulterate our output in order to compete. As a small business, service or artist of any kind, we are now expected to be mining our real life, really anything we have, any talents, our looks, our children…any currency we can exploit to try and get people’s attention. As Bo Burnham muses in Inside “The outside world, the non-digital world, is merely a theatrical space in which one stages and records content for the much more real, much more vital digital space”

The digital space is now saturated with gurus on every subject and promoting everything imaginable, who, perhaps it’s just me but, seem increasingly uncertain of what they're selling, of how they're selling it and if what they're doing holds meaning or is even working. The self help gurus who proselytise self-reliance with an air of selfish detachment and a ‘team’ behind them. The couple selling the tantra workshop, that… is it just me or do they look a little … wide eyed and disconnected. The woman selling her embodied dance methodology seems.. Frantic… wired. The slow living, cottage core influencer who portrays a life of quiet ease but when the camera is off runs around clearing up and stays up till 2.00 to finish an edit in order to keep to their once weekly posting schedule.

I feel as though my dreams have become infected with images of shiny, filtered, smiling success, that I’ve consumed so much of the saccharine and luridly coloured stuff that it’s leaving me with a queasy feeling. This is not what I want, I don’t think this is what I want, is this what I want? What do I want? And how can I figure out what I want quickly so I can be back on my self- actualisation game and sell a program whilst looking hot, whilst showing off my perfect home and my three children which I haven’t even started making yet and now I’m so tired even just thinking about it I need to go have a lie down. If there was an honest feed of my life it would mostly consist of me lying down.

This shimmering, showy notion of success is not what I really want. It is not what I actually dream of when I dream my private heady dreams steeped in longing and something distinctly, specifically mine. But it feels like a stream of Instagram style, glossy success has been mixed into the pail with my actual dreams and the resulting immiscible, mottled concoction is hard to separate and thus extract what is mine.

I want to spit out the medicine, for the chimera of materialist individual success to hold less sway over my dreams. If it’s not too late, to dream dreams of a different nature, that have a different flavour, something nourishing and not like the straight to the brain first bite of something sweet but like the first bite of a home cooked stew, a whole bowl, the whole pot, the whole cow. Can we dream big again by dreaming small, unshowy, unglamorous, unphotogenic dreams of mutualistic, communal, sustainable, actually joyful success, that exists for its own sake and is not staged for later dissemination?

These dreams have such a different tenor, they feel soothing rather than activating, feel like relief rather than pressure. These dreams consist of rest, of community, of laughter and of sharing the load.

I have started to notice a shift. Friends of mine who once I could scarcely have imagined dirtying their trainers, now dream dreams of a hands-plunged-in-soil kind of wholesomeness. I’m having more and more conversations about starting communities, about permaculture, about buying land. The more extreme, alcohol fuelled of which, climax in American prepper style plans that several years ago would have been considered un- invited back to the dinner party levels of crazy, but somehow don’t seem so crazy anymore. They appear almost…sensible.

But the bridge from here to there. From our flats in cities and self-centred atomisation to full blown communal, sustainable ecovillages seems so impossible to even begin to construct that we feel impotent and hopeless.

So we continue living our materialist, atomised lives whilst watching YouTube videos of cottage core influencers, of preppers, of sustainability influencers. We watch, we yearn and stay living in the city.

I personally find myself obsessively watching videos about the amish, about mormons, about the Bruderhof, about Eco communes and every type of community imaginable, I fantasise about living in these communities, about having been brought up in one, that it might have saved me from this bottomless pit of naval gazing, self-diagnosis and perpetual feeling of ‘wrongness’ that I can’t quite put my finger on. Sometimes this fantasising verges on dangerous, I find myself feeling envy for people in high control, high demand groups. They have no need for social media, they don’t have to self-actualise and document the process, the entire burden for running their lives, working, studying, keeping the house clean etc doesn’t rest solely on just one person shoulders. It looks… relaxing. All the women cooking together in their long skirts and not having to work and… oh dear.. this is when I need to shut the laptop and call a friend.

Sometimes I find it hard to imagine what a not-atomised, not-individualist, not-self-obsessed life might look like. What being part of a healthy, sustainable community might look like. One that wouldn’t descend into infighting, or degrade horribly into something dysfunctional and abusive. Does a community need a shared history to make it work? A shared religion or myth? Is it possible for us to dream up something new, something healthy and sustainable, that we could begin to create now.?

It is unknown who first coined the phrase: “It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism”. Whether it was Frederic Jameson or Slavoj Zizek. Mark Fisher cites them both in Capitalist Realism. We are so entrenched, individualist capitalism is all that we know. It is the micro-plastic filled sea we swim in and the polluted air we breathe.

Is it possible we are just too warped by our self-obsessed, individualist culture to be able to live in community now? So many of us regularly and blithely say things like ‘I hate people’, and talk about how we’re introverts despite being outwardly social seeming. Would we be able to overcome the comfort of what is normal for us? Of constantly thinking about ourselves, of rarely having to put others first or think communally?

I hope not. I hope to try, I hope that the process itself might be the antidote, that I might have to continually swallow the pill of discomfort until I am purged of self-absorption.

All I know is I don’t want to have to self-actualise anymore.

I’m tired