The great age of entitlement

They, being the tiny minority of the privileged on the planet who believe the world revolves around them: Those who need an entire team of people just to get through the day. Therapists, coaches, trainers, healers, kinesiologists, spiritual teachers, mentors, gurus, massage therapists, fortune tellers, astrologers and diviners.

They crave ever more input, advice and know-how. Also feedback. Immediate feedback. Their every move monitored via numerous apps and devices. How many steps they walk, how well they sleep, how their heart and bowels are functioning. They can also calculate the amount of time they spend on their devices taking these measurements. Thus saving time.

So much extra time is offered through the constant use of online diaries, notifications, planners. Entire apps to do just that. You can get motivationally awakened in the morning by having a highly successful person scream at you. You can get meditation guidance, books, condensed versions of books, audio books, podcasts. And then, you can share with your friends and with the world. Look! Look! This is what I’m eating. This is where I walked this morning. Have you seen this amazing statement that Plato made? OMG! I am sooo Excited! – I have just discovered the ultimate vegan mayonnaise. On and on, you can check your Instagram and Facebook and telegram and Twitter so that you are on top of what’s happening everywhere, to everyone, all the time. It really is a bit like everything, everywhere, all at once.

And then there are the rituals. A whole host of things to do before starting the day. Juicing, meditating, movement, Yoga, affirmations, cold water submersion, sauna, journaling – getting yourself just right to greet the day.

Yet the statistics show that there have never been more depressed, suicidal, unhappy and unmotivated people than there are now. The youth in particular have had more new mental diagnoses in the last few decades than in the past many hundred years put together. Mental health itself, or the lack of it, has never looked so dire. Addictions of all kinds are on a continuous upward trajectory, with the demand for mental recovery and addiction centres spurring a huge economic explosion in those fields.

And even as we assign ever more finely tuned definitions for conditions, mental health diagnoses, gender and even states of being, in the name of extending tolerance amongst men, so does the division in race, religion, gender, wealth, health and political viewpoint seem to grow.

We celebrate individuality even as we coalesce in more and more groups and require herd input for everything and anything we do. Today decisions are only made once large groups of people have deliberated, measured and assessed. Branding experts, social mediation facilitators, discrimination handlers, coaches, storytellers, conflict resolution managers and many others need to input anything from a company name change, to opening a new business branch in another state, to deciding exactly how to spend the billions donated for a worthy cause. Yet these group activities do not seem to increase productivity, eliminate bias or create solutions in meaningful time frames.

It appears people have generally become less tolerant, more stressed, more easily offended and more unable to cope with the bare necessities of life. They have also become less intelligent. Research conducted by The greater good organisation blames the pandemic for a general decrease in agreeableness and kindness, especially amongst the youth. More disturbing perhaps, is that IQ levels have been falling since 1975 and research shows that it is not due to genetic factors and ‘no one knows why’! (www.science.howstuffworks.com) This trend reverses what was previously known as The Flynn effect – an observed rise in intelligence over time. This increase of around three points per decade has now not only stopped, but has reversed! Is it this decrease in general intelligence that underpins the sense of entitlement and the inability to deal with simple basics? Because the bare necessities of life seem to elude many – and certainly much of the youth.

That simple get up, splash some water on your face, brush your teeth, shower, get dressed and go do something that will earn you a living. Then come home and celebrate the fact that you have a roof over your head, medical care and food on the table. That your kids are fed, schooled and housed and that you have a car and can take some holidays. The simple bare necessities of life. (With apologies to the Jungle Book).

Work. Strive. Sweat. Make an effort. Be grateful. Be content. But do something.

Nothing is in your way. Not the retrograde planets, not your past life poverty oath, nor your early childhood beliefs. No, you don’t need to have a family constellation to clear the past generational patterns around wealth. You don’t need another book or course on how to manifest, or clear your shadow, or connect to more joy. You don’t need a host of people both seen and unseen to guide you. As someone once said, ‘the universe doesn’t actually give a damn’. It doesn’t owe you. It’s not your ‘birthright’ to have enormous wonderfulness pursue you all the days of your life.

You just need to consider how absolutely fortunate you are. Right here, right now. Living in this most prosperous and auspicious age. An age when people have never had more. More food, more medicine, more advantage. The comedian Jimmy Carr said in a recent interview that people in the west suffer from life dysmorphia. Like body dysmorphia but with their lives. A condition where you are not appreciating or seeing how fortunate you are when compared to even 50 years ago. He mentions that there were, for example, no hot showers at that time. We have never in the history of the planet, in the course of some 100 billion people being alive, had so much food, so much entertainment, so much medical care. Life has never been this good for people across all the ages of time. You are living at the apex of human existence.

Yet so many of the fortunate few spend most of their days trying to make things better. Trying to find things to fix and reasons why things are not working as spectacularly as they should. And comparing. Endlessly comparing. The electronic age has made that possible, if not imperative. It draws in people’s time, attention and focus. And what you focus on expands.

Though most people now know about energy and healing and that everything is connected and exists by virtue of relationship; though they can throw around quantum physics and zero point and psycho or spiritual something; though mainstream has come on board to prove scientifically these previously esoteric notions, there has also never been so much diluting and diverting of the facts. So little actual application. So much disinformation in the guise of information. Consider the simple fact that most esoteric bookstores no longer exist. Nor does the body, mind, spirit sector in most bookstores and, where it does, it’s confined to paganism, witchcraft and astrology. Consider that what was previously New Age has been absorbed and overtaken by the self-help, psychology and motivational world, run mostly by businessmen in snazzy suits. In America. Land of the free.

And this motivational, self-help world is focused on measurable and constant improvement. The part I mentioned right at the start. A bit like the constant necessity to upgrade devices and to keep consumerism going in many subtle and less subtle ways. Here we have the energetic and spiritual worlds becoming synonymous with a never-ending striving to clear and transform and improve all aspects of our being through much physical and mental activity. Generously sprinkled with words like meditation, energy, transformation and so on. And because these words are mentioned, we believe that we are, in fact, engaged in spiritual or energetic transformation when we write our gratitude journal or submerge in ice cold water. But perhaps we have become immersed in spiritual consumerism and just don’t know it.

Of course everything is indeed energy and connected, but I do wonder if we have been somehow misdirected in terms of where we put our attention and energy, in this great age of deception called Kali Yuga.

Because the key and only thing to remember about this thing called energy, is that WHAT YOU FOCUS ON EXPANDS. When you add your energy – your thought, emotions, words – to something, it grows. The nature of the energy does not matter – love or hate – it’s the same thing.

Are we being distracted in the so-called spiritual and energetic world, with so many activities and things to do in the name of esoteric, that it feeds and grows our sense of entitlement, our sense of ego, making us forget the things that really matter. Diluting the power of our collective focus and energy. A sort of hiding of things in broad daylight.

For while we are so obsessed with our self-improvement, spending US$41 billion on the global self-improvement market in 2023, which is predicted to grow to $81bn by 2032, the world literally burns. Mindfulness is a billion-dollar business. Has self-improvement become an obsession? Does it fuel our insecurities and ego, taking our attention away from the things that really matter, both personally and globally, but confusing us in thinking that we are doing something wonderful and spiritual – raising the consciousness on the planet?

We, the fortunate few who have the means and resources as well as some knowledge and understanding of the energetic and spiritual worlds, could be spending our time and energy, as well as our resources, on improving so much in the world. Because it seems to me that while we have so much of our time and attention focused on ourselves, the world continues to unravel around us.

So consider what you help to grow each day – with each swipe of the screen. With each word, each feeling, each judgment of approval or disapproval of something or someone. Are you growing conspiracy theories, awful leaders, dystopian futures, global warming, wars, division?

No – they cannot exist if you withdraw your energy. Reality only exists by virtue of our agreement. Any reality. All these wars and dissent and awfulness being perpetrated on the planet at this exact moment are only very minimally created by the small handful of people involved. These realities are mostly created and kept going and growing by the collective attention, hate, hate speech, negativity and aversion, fed to them by those who put their attention there. The war, abuse and other horrible phenomena are further created and kept going by feeding these thought forms in the form of crime thrillers and other really violent books (one of the best-selling genres on the planet), horrifically violent movies which are watched for entertainment (if no one watched them, no one would produce them), traumatic literature and art filled with angst (which is supposed to be cleansing) and really violent games now fed to the children.

Consider that every time you add your horrified energy when you watch some crime drama ‘for entertainment’ you help create more of these events in physical reality.

That’s the truth about energy, when it comes down to it. And if you believe that everything is energy then you have to stop watching and repeating all and any news. Especially desist from spreading negative news and events. Do not watch, read or buy anything which is not adding love, peace and goodwill to the collective energetic field.

The good old ‘make love, not war’ is still valid. In those good ol’ ’60s days, John Lennon had a love lie in, the hippies gathered together and danced and sang and made love and flower garlands to stop wars.

Of course these days we believe we are so entitled to our voice, our opinion, our outrage, that we can post it all over the place, continuing to feed what?

Withdraw! Withdraw! Withdraw! Attention. Speech. Connection. Focus. From the things you do not want.

There is only one focus – Love.

Reduce! Reduce! Reduce! The many things you think you need to get through the day and to improve yourself.

There is only one need – Contentment.

Accept! Accept! Accept! That you are but a tiny speck in the universe – meaningless, unimportant, irrelevant – yet the universe lives within every atom of your being. What will you do with that?