In our materialistic culture, one of the biggest complaints one hears about our middle-class children these days is that they are so spoiled. No matter how many things and paid-for experiences that they have, they “need” more. More sneakers, more video games, a new smartphone, a new car, more fashionable clothing, more vacations to Disney World, tickets to Taylor Swift concerts. The wish list is endless.
And when they don’t get everything that they want, they feel depressed, they feel empty. Young people need a lot of defined discrete entities nowadays in order to pull themselves out of their numbness and feel alive.
One theory that attempts to explain this behavior is that young people tend to want to consume all these materialistic pleasures to compensate for the lack of love and emotional support from their families. On one level, it seems like a reasonable explanation. A modern young person lacks the grounding and the bonding from flowing blendable continual organic stimulation to feel fully alive in a healthy way. This is the result not only of a lack of warm loving families but of a lack of warm embracing living environments. However, for right now, we will focus on the deficiencies within the modern family rather than those within the modern living environment. Anyway, in order to pull himself out of his emotional experiential vacuum, the young person immerses himself in his materialistic pleasures which serve to provide him with kicks in order to intermittently shock him out of his numbness.
I think that this explanation goes part of the way in terms of explaining the phenomenon of the spoiled child, but it leaves out a key factor. When a person gets every material phenomenon that he wants without having to put any work into the process of obtaining it, he loses his sense of control over his life processes. It gets back to that old saying of “Use it or lose it”. A person develops what I have called in previous articles conative anesthesia: the numbing of the will. The will is the psychological component that keeps him most connected to the external world. Without it, a person ends up without a means of bonding to the material phenomena that surround him and of grounding himself in his living environment. This explains why a spoiled young person gets bored very quickly with something that he is given, without him having to put some kind of effort on his part in order to obtain it. He just doesn’t have a strong enough will to stay connected to it. He needs to exercise his will by having to maintain his grades in school for a certain period of time, for instance, in order to get a certain special gift from his parents. Or else he should be assigned certain chores that he has to do around the house for a certain period of time in order to earn that special gift.
One wonders if this lack of capacity to stay bonded emotionally to all the material possessions that a young person is given by his parents as a result of his weakened will would also apply to his role as a lover as he grows older. As appealing as it may seem on one level, free love is the enemy of commitment. Without a strong enough will, it becomes very difficult for a person to sustain his connection to a lover. No wonder the divorce rate is so high and so many people remain single all their lives in America today. And so many single women end up becoming exasperated in their search for a partner with whom to raise children and so they decide to become single mothers and raise children by themselves instead.
So, we have established that a weakened will is a major cause of children not being able to sustain interest for very long in different things that they receive from their parents and of adults not being able to sustain interest in committed partners for very long. But is there another factor that influences the development of weakened wills? In effect, we have talked in this article about the emotional experiential vacuum that parents create in their family environment that leads to weakening the wills of their children. But to the extent that people are influenced by the physical experiential vacuum created by modern technological society, the numbing effects of this environment are also conducive to weakening people’s wills. As a matter of fact, the numbing effects of the physical experiential vacuum in today’s world are, in truth the underlying cause of the weakening of people’s wills of any age. So, if we want to minimize the effects of feeling spoiled today on the general population, we have to promote flowing blendable continual experiences filled with organic stimulation, so that people don’t develop addictive personalities and don’t become hoarders, and instead start developing the capacity to have meaningful connections to other people and to more organic environments.
© 2024 Laurence Mesirow
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