Where Does It Hurt?

Discontent is a powerful thing. We all have it. Even the most accomplished of us – the wealthiest, most worthy, most well balanced and happiest – wish some aspect of our situation, our lives or ourselves, could somehow be different. 

This is why democracy is an illusion. 

Our discontent makes us vulnerable to manipulation. Because thinking takes effort, and we’ve become conditioned to reject anything that takes effort, particularly in this day of ready meals, fast food, and instant gratification. It’s easier, therefore, to let others do the hard work for us. Food is ready prepared. Information is ready digested. We believe what we’re told to think.

And this is where the trouble lies.

At the least it makes us targetable consumers. If we’re unhappy with our body image, for example – a dissatisfaction often fuelled by marketeers and the media with their images of body perfection – we become targets for those who sell diet plans, gym memberships, and weight-loss supplements. If we are unhappy with the way we look (and it’s hard not to be when we’re constantly surrounded by images of beautiful people in all the media that we consume), it makes us a target for those who promise us Hollywood-glamour through their fashion lines, their make-up, their coffee machines, and their all-inclusive holiday packages.

If we’re unhappy with our lives, there are no end of brands promising to make us complete if we just buy their car, their houses, their sofas, their… whatever. And when we rack up the debt on store cards and credit cards and buy-now-pay-later schemes, we have to ask, who’s really getting the best deal out of this? Is it us with our latest games console which will be obsolete in a couple of years, or is it the money lenders, who are profiting from the debt we’re accruing through yet another line of unnecessary credit? 

There’s nothing wrong with wanting nice stuff, but we must be aware when the advertisers are manipulating our thinking and our desires. Because the satisfaction that comes from holding the latest iPhone in your hand can be short-lived. When the reward hormones wear off, the discontent still remains. And we can keep feeding it with unchecked ‘retail therapy’ like some kind of insatiable drug addict, or we can practice gratitude, disconnect ourselves from the influences and influencers that benefit from our discontent, and understand that we already have everything we need to live complete lives already.

But rampant commercialism is just the beginning. It gets a lot darker than this, when you become aware how vulnerable we are to have our thinking and our belief processes hijacked by people whose goals are more sinister than simply selling us a few more video games and microwave pizzas.

Our discontent can be weaponised and used for profit by people and parties of influence who have a political agenda. It’s long been known that those with the deepest pockets, the simplest message, and the loudest voices, gain the most votes in an election, and as a result, democracy proves itself to be an illusion. 

Our leaders in the West are corrupt liars, and they don’t try to hide it. Media channels with an agenda amplify these lies. Once it was billboards and newspaper ads. Now it’s the social media platforms in every pocket and on every desk. 

Foreign actors (think Russia and China buying attention and spreading confusion on Facebook and Twitter in order to destabilize objective thinking) rock the boat further. And we, as consumers conditioned to believing everything we’re told (and too lazy to think for ourselves), believe what we’re seeing on the screens that our eyeballs are glued to. 

Make America Great Again. Get Brexit Done. Crooked Hilary. I’m Lovin’ It. Drink Coke. Simple to digest, but ultimately meaningless and empty, messages. Sugar to rot the teeth of the soul.

This isn’t harmless. This isn’t just about selling a few more pairs of jeans. It’s about dividing and conquering, and lining the pockets of those who care little for our wellbeing but value their own mightily. It leads to border walls. It leads to entire demographics voting against their best interests. It leads to people being short-changed out of healthcare and their own homes. It leads to entire cultures being demonized. It leads to people in need being branded as threats to society. It leads to people in far off lands being bombed by remote controlled drones for no reason other than to profit the bomb makers.

It leads to hate. And persecution. And innocent people suffering. 

People. People like you. People like me. 

We are being hypnotized to consume, to think what we’re told to think. We are being led to believe that our lives are lacking because we don’t have the latest phone, a better car, and because foreigners fleeing war zones are taking the bread from our table. Muslims are bad and want to kill us. The unemployed are the reason you can’t afford a new TV set. That other country somewhere else, and all the people in it, are our enemy. They are different to us. They are barely human.

Don’t believe the hype.

When the seeds of division are being sewn, we must ask ourselves “who is benefitting from this?”

When British voters were convinced by millionaires and media moguls that they would be better off leaving the EU, who really stood to gain? When a new military offensive in a far-off land is announced, which company’s shares rocket on the stock exchange? When a new global pandemic starts to destabilize an entire nation’s economy, who benefits?

Who’s being played? Who stands to win by encouraging you to focus your eyeballs, your outrage and your fear in a particular direction?

Our discontent becomes weaponised in order to benefit those who profit from our unhappiness and division.

Who is getting rich from your targeted anger towards others? Who is getting rich from your anxiety and dissatisfaction? What do you really stand to gain by voting against something, rather than for something?

Those immigrants, desperate for our help, risking their lives on the oceans, they’re not a threat. They’re people like us, who have been let down and abandoned by their leaders. Leaders just like ours.

Those people in Europe and Mexico, those people risking their lives to escape one nation in order to reach another, they’re not out to get us, to do us out of jobs, to take the food from our tables. They just want to live a life free of suffering, just like we do.

Those people who look or sound different, who have a different religion, a different way of life, a different way of dressing, they’re not here to destroy everything that’s precious to us. 

All these people… they’re us. They are you and me. They are our brothers and sisters.

When our discontent is used to divide us, we need to ask who gains to benefit from our division. Because division is not the natural way of things. Borders aren’t real. We are not meant to be kept apart, kept from wandering, kept from settling anywhere we wish on this tiny planet that’s spinning around our sun in the vast expanse of space. 

In these days of radicalism, of consumerism and populism, our discontent becomes a currency and a handle by which we can be controlled. We hurt because we feel our lives are lacking, and we’ve been led to believe it is the fault of a person or a group of people, or because we don’t have enough stuff.

We can allow ourselves to become puppets, and let our anger and dissatisfaction lead to more suffering and division. Or we can choose to look deeper. We can seek instant gratification with the junk food of hate and division, or we can ask ourselves one simple question.

“Where does it hurt?”

Where in my life am I suffering? Where am I lacking? Where am I looking to blame others for my discontent? Where can I choose the sticking plaster of anger, or the long term solution of compassion. 

Because anger and hurt and dissatisfaction lead to walls that keep ordinary people apart and prolong their suffering. It leads to people drowning in the Mediterranean while private contractors earn themselves millions from security contracts.

But there is another way. We can choose compassion. We can choose to seek first to understand the discontent of others before we feed our own discontent. Compassion seeks out the cause of the suffering. Where does it hurt? Where can we heal? Where should we focus our attention, our empathy, and our humanity? Only by seeking to understand the pain of others can we hope to heal our own suffering.

This can be about anger and profit, or it can be about suffering and humanity. And it all comes down to whether or not we choose to let our discontent be weaponised, or whether we permit ourselves to see our own faces reflected in the faces of others.

So when you feel the outrage rising, ask yourself, who owns this discontent? When you feel your anger against another person or group growing, ask yourself – where does it hurt? What do I gain from this targeted anger? When you feel the urge to go online and let rip, first try to discover what is really causing that bile to rise, and what good will it do. Because if it doesn’t benefit you, chances are you’re being manipulated for the benefit of someone else.