Hakan
@hakanderin
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191 okur puanı
Kasım 2017 tarihinde katıldı
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We now know without doubt that chronic loneliness is associated with an elevated risk of illness and early death. It has been shown to increase mortality from cancer and other diseases and has been compared to the harm of smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.
Reklam
Corporations are ingenious at exploiting people's needs without actually meeting them. Naomi Klein, in her book No Logo, made vividly clear how big business began in the 1980s to home in on people's natural desire to belong to something larger than themselves. Brand-aware companies such as Nike, Lululemon, and the Body Shop are marketing much more than products: they sell meaning, identification, and an almost religious sense of belonging through association with their brand. "That presupposes a kind of emptiness and yearning in people," I suggested when I interviewed the prolific author and activist. "Yes," Klein replied. "They tap into a longing and a need for belonging, and they do it by exploiting the insight that just selling running shoes isn't enough. We humans want to be part of a transcendent project."
With the erosion of the middle class in recent decades, people who judged themselves in terms of worldly success have sustained a perceived loss of worth. The promise of the middle-class dream has largely evaporated, to the distress and deep anger of many. But even people perched atop the economic pyramid can experience devaluation of self, for the simple reason that materialistic values can counter to the need for meaning for purpose beyond self-serving endeavors.
Dislocation, in Bruce's formulation, describes a loss of connection to self, to others, and to a sense of meaning and purpose -all of which appear on the roster of essential needs above. Lest the word "dislocation" conjure something hazy like "being lost," he is quick with a graphic metaphor. "Think of a dislocated shoulder," he said, "a shoulder disarticulated, out of joint. You didn't cut off the arm, but it's just hanging there and not working anymore. Useless. That's how dislocated people experience themselves. It's excruciatingly painful."
Among psychologists there is wide-ranging consensus about what our core needs consist of, some of which we have already explored. These have been variously listed as:
- belonging, relatedness, or connectedness;
- autonomy: a sense of control in one's life;
- mastery or competence;
- genuine self-esteem, not dependent on achievement, attainment, acquisition, or valuation by others;
- trust: a sense of having the personal and social resources needed to sustain one through life; and
- purpose, meaning, transcendence: knowing oneself as part of something larger than isolated, self-centered concerns, whether that something is overtly spiritual or simply universal/humanistic, or, given our evolutionary origins, Nature.
Reklam