Possible Futures can help you get back in touch with creativity and connections. For all the benefits of technology today, author Jude Treder-Wolff says “We are as hungry for love and connection, for meaning and purpose, as human beings at any other time in history.”
Moving toward the intersection of mind/emotion with culture/environment, studies show the effects of a consumer-driven society tends to make us believe things we know aren’t true. Our tendency is to hold on to the old familiar as long as possible but still reap the benefits of life-changing innovations, but that results in conflicts and creates unease.
Treder-Wolff says we need critical, creative thought, but it has little opportunity to thrive when the habits of mind are impatient and ambiguous.
Citing research that eternal factors have little effect on our happiness, it’s a wonder we all seem so responsive to the consumer-driven society. In reality, the four elements of the greatest life satisfaction are:
Autonomy
Competence
Relatedness and
Self-worth
The author notes that money and luxury were very low on the happiness scale in the research cited. Instead, social capital, that sense of connectedness, ranks right up there as a fourth form of capital, along with financial, human and physical capital. We should not under-estimate its power. Epidemiologist, Richard Wilkinson, states: “Almost any measure of social affiliation seems to be related to health.”
Chapter Four, “The World Is Not Enough” contains some interesting studies about consumerism and the role of status and labels in our material world. It takes us far from the creative consciousness we need for personal and social transformation.
“We enjoy all the achievements of modern civilization that have made our physical existence on this earth easier in so many important ways, yet we do not know exactly what to do with ourselves, where to turn. The world of our experiences seems chaotic, disconnected, confusing, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain."
Vaclav Havel, former Czech Republic President, 1995
Too often it seems we’re willing to settle for information at the expense of meaning, which leaves the author wondering: “And where are we going at this breakneck speed? Maybe to crazytown.”
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