Marla came to my practice recently, complaining of depression and anxiety that she simply could not explain.
“My life is good!”, she reported. “I have everything a person could want. A good marriage. A home. A job. Financial security. Good health. Two well adjusted children. Annual family vacations….”
In her list, which follows the quintessential middle class North American script for living a “good” life, Marla was relaying to me that she had ticked all the boxes but still found life wanting. Even more impressively she had thus far escaped any significant tragedies that would wound or scar her life.
So now, plagued by fears and sadness she could not explain, sleepless nights, difficulty leaving the house, and an abiding sense that she was headed towards losing her mind, Marla found herself overwhelmed, yet struggling to feel as if any of her suffering was legitimate.
I’ve changed her name, but really, it could be any number of male of female patients from a variety of age groups and walks of life, that present for consultation with some similar version of a very similar set of problems. All of them in this particular boat describe themselves as unable to see why they should be suffering in this way without any sufficient reason to provide them with valid justification for needing attention from specialists. And it is precisely because of this apparently illegitimacy of their suffering that they struggle to be open with other people about their mounting psychological impairment. Most of them watch the news and observe the suffering taking place in other parts of the world, and wonder what it is that they have to be so sad about or afraid of.
It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that when symptoms emerge, it’s a sign that there’s something wrong with our selves. But sometimes environments can be the source of dis-ease…not every problem is internal in its origin. It can be tempting to blame biology and overlook the role our culture has in creating illness. In fact, I think there’s some financial interests pretty deeply invested in having us believe that chemical imbalances are all the explanation we need for mental illness. There’s an entire economy at stake in helping us avoid the confrontation with this question: “what if the ‘good life’ as it’s been presented to us, isn’t so ‘good’ after all?”
Is it possible that this overabundance is actually creating problems within us? Could it be that we still lack something even in the midst of all this wealth?
There is, another kind of poverty. It’s the poverty of excess. It’s a poverty that exists in the midst of the kind overabundance so common to many people in the developed world. With so many resources it’s very difficult to regard our lives as deprived of anything. But the poverty of excess is not one we can solve by simply acquiring more of something because it is our acquisition driven lifestyles that are actually creating the poverty in the first place.
As I noted in my post, “First World Problems”, it can sometimes feel invalid to complain about the kind of suffering experienced by those who live in the top 10% of world incomes (which is most people in North America). But ignoring the spiritual illness brought on by individualism, consumerism, and following the middle class “script” may actually perpetuate the behaviors that we engage in that result in the oppression of the developing world.
In the midst of our poverty of excess, it can be difficult to put our finger on exactly what we lack, because we appear to have so much, too much even. So what does a poverty of excess look like?
I realize this is too large a topic to cover in one blog post. But I want to start first by drawing our attention to the mere existence of the poverty of excess or overabundance.
It’s been said that if you want to know what water is like, don’t ask a fish. It’s hard to see the poverty we swim in in our culture. Traveling and living elsewhere can help so greatly with this - like swimming in a different pond for a while to gain perspective on your natural habitat. For the longer you’re immersed, the more difficult it can be to describe what it is you’re immersed in.
People like Marla are sometimes unaware that there even is a culture they’re immersed in, let alone begin to know how to describe it. I’m not sure that I do either. But let’s try. Let’s begin by recognizing that in the water of our culture there are messages like, “you can never have enough or be enough”. Let’s start to open our minds to the counter-intuitive reality that excess, or overabundance doesn’t create a sense of sufficiency, but actually creates anxiety about deprivation and a vague sense of needing more.
Maybe we can even learn to recognize how some of our emotional struggles emerge in a context where comfort and security are presented as normative, and suffering is regarded as a failure to live up to the culturally ordained plan for the good life.
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