Insecurity
Ever cringe when you hear a bad line of dialogue in an otherwise great movie?
How about this one from Jerry Maguire?
“You complete me.”
A generation of people…actual grown-ass, non-teeny bopper humans…found those words to be incredibly romantic.
(Damn, these clunky brains of ours are easy to manipulate)
No matter what Tom Cruise says between VERY long pauses…feeling like an incomplete human being isn’t romantic. For fuck’s sake, it’s the definition of insecurity.
Literally.
It would be very hard to return a serve from Roger Federer…to avoid a Manny Pacquiao uppercut…to be more in love with Bradley Cooper than Lady Gaga is. Well, that’s the level of challenge our clunky brains are up against in this society.
Listen to people talk about themselves. For almost everyone you’ll ever meet, their greatest life passion isn’t love or money…it’s insecurity. That’s what drives so much of our behavior. More than anything else, it’s the fuel we run on.
If we’re being uncomfortably honest, our society is a place where…
- Dudes learn they should feel insecure for not having enough fur on their heads.
- Chicks learn they should read magazines that exist (almost exclusively) to make them feel insecure for not looking like computer-altered images of other insecure people.
- Job titles are labels we use to rank how some people are more important than others.
- Counting green pieces of paper is a way to decide which humans mean the most.
- We even feel embarrassment when our metal driving machines are old, noisy, and break down…
- And genuine pride in ourselves if our metal machines on wheels are one of the “good ones.”
Sound ridiculous?
Think I’m exaggerating?
Ok, really try to remember how much time you’ve spent worrying about what other people think of you. Even those you’ll never see again.
(Hint: A big chunk of your life)
In case you haven’t noticed, the criteria we use to feel self-conscious is almost always silly.
There’s no end to the dumb list of shit we use to feel insecure. I mean, even just measure how tall you are. If it’s outside of a “reasonable” range, that becomes one of the most dominant factors in your life.
Our clunky brains refuse to accept that we’re enough. But we weren’t born this way, right? No baby sits in a crib thinking like this. It took years of intense life training to learn how to be insecure. We needed to be programmed so that we could think in such ridiculous ways.
In 2019, we’re so used to insecurity that it doesn’t seem unusual anymore. Our society is built around it. We’ve even learned to use technology that can automate our madness. I was in a movie theater recently watching a woman who couldn’t go more than 15 minutes without looking at her phone…
Work crisis?
Family emergency?
Nope. She kept checking to see how many people clicked “like” on her Instagram post. Over and over. We’ve always been desperate to be liked…but now we can actually track the “likes.”
For all of us, there’s a not-so-subtle war going on against bad programming. We can’t win it if we don’t see it.
Nothing can ever complete you because you’re not incomplete.
See you next month. Except for you, Tom Cruise.
(Programming note – To the person who asked where the credit card page is…seriously? To everyone else I haven’t written back to yet, please give me another couple of weeks and I should be all caught up. Thanks)
