Anxiety, Self-Knowledge & the Mirage of External Success

One inauthentic style of dealing with our emotional confusion and shaky psychology is to work hard to negate them through achievement. Those who do this flee from a lot of self-doubt and insecurity, but just barely. The dark side of the American dream obsession.

People with this obsession stay just a step ahead of anxiety, like someone fleeing from an angry dog that’s right behind them. The angry dog of fear, anxiety, confusion and “shaky uncertainty”, that accompanies a life that lacks self-knowledge, can chase many people into a fierce struggle for power, position and wealth.

A False Path

It’s important that you avoid this seductive struggle because it’s a false path; it doesn’t deliver what it promises.

Over the years I’ve worked with many people who fall into this category. They reason that great financial success and recognition will conquer their doubt and uncertainty. They work hard to achieve great success and wealth because they are driven to do so. This is a bad faith, high risk path. It leads to the Great Nowhere. Money can be a great enabler of life, but it's a poor substitute for life.

Wealth and power can entertain us for a time. But it won't ever free us from anxiety and uncertainty. The big  payoff of a life of relaxed ease, satisfaction and fulfillment never comes. We just suffer the same old anxiety. Until or unless we dive deep into who we truly are, beyond family and cultural conditioning, Only then can we know the joy of living what really matters in life.

A Seductive Mirage

Mere external success is a mirage. It doesn't tend to the source of our anxiety and emotional confusion.  We are not anxious because we don't have enough or because something is wrong or with us. Life lived within our surface thinking-mind is life at the shallow end of the pool. Self-Knowledge and a deeply felt certainty about who we are and what our lives are needed to bring us into deep waters.

Our culture tends to reward the pursuit of mirages to medicate fear and self-doubt by seeking certainty outside of oneself. It doesn’t matter how you get rich and powerful, as long as you get rich and powerful.

It may be better to be rich, powerful and poisoned than to be just poisoned, but surely not that much better.

The Danger of Bad Faith Bets

And people who are stuck at the mere surface of life, who achieve external success, have the added burden of having to face that they have been misled, that they have spent long and often tortuous hours marching in the heat of many a noonday sun—toward a mirage. Many hit a wall realizing they made a wrong turn in life. And they have to fall apart some before they can recover. Those that don't make eve more costly bad faith bets. Like someone who want to go from San Francisco to Washington State but who makes the mistake of driving south instead of north. They then change the welcome sign in Tijuana to "Welcome to Seattle."

There's no deep relief or satisfaction in wealth and power only. Once we have them, we discover that we are still under still under attack by the same old feelings, but now with a different agenda of concerns. “Was I just lucky? Will I be found out? Can I do it again? Will I lose my position, my wealth…and so on and on and on.”

The stress, anxiety and uncertainty monsters don’t go away if we get rich and powerful; they just drive in more expensive cars and live in more expensive homes.