A Reflective Life With Purpose: Is This Still Possible?

“We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.”  –Thomas Merton

I live in the town of Fishers, IN. A couple of months ago, in October, two very large new business ventures opened not 5 minutes away from my apartment. The first is IKEA, a monstrous home furnishings store that declares prices that everyone can afford. The second is TopGolf, a towering high-tech golf-themed entertainment center. These were viewed as positive additions to the local economy due to the amount of people they had the ability to cater to, and the appeal they have in being right off I-69 to attract visitors from out of town.

I’ve visited TopGolf one time since it opened. We waited nearly two hours to get a bay, and from what I’ve been told that was a good night. Most evenings you’re lucky if you can even find a spot in the parking lot, and I’ve heard complaints from other patrons that have reported wait times between 3-5 hours. If you’re waiting 3-5 hours just so you can hit some golf balls off a fancy driving range while somebody serves you drinks, I’d say you’re leaning on the side of possibly having some kind of brain damage. Meanwhile, my girlfriend and I have made two different attempts to at least go walk through IKEA to see what it is all about exactly. Mostly just because we’ve never been in one previously. However, on both attempts it was so busy that the main lot was blocked off by police and you were forced to go park across the road at a nearby business where they could then either shuttle you over or you could walk the extra distance. Needless to say we weren’t THAT interested in seeing it, so we left both times without ever going in.

I didn’t initially think anything of these ventures coming to town. My initial reaction was pretty much just “Oh, that’s cool. Maybe I’ll check them out.” Over two months in now, these places have been absolutely flooded with business to the point where I don’t even really have any desire to attempt to visit either one anymore. The waits, crowds, and insanity surrounding it is not worth it to me. My time is more valuable than that.

My purpose is not to attack these businesses, but instead to point to what I believe to be a disturbing trend in regards to society’s infatuation with consumerism. Why are people so completely obsessed with a furniture store and a driving range? This seems to happen with every new large business. It opens and people completely overwhelm it up until the next new thing opens up and then they move on to that. In all honesty, it never even seems to matter what the business is. If it’s marketed properly as being the next big thing, people will show up.

We live in a consumer driven society. It only seems to get worse every year. Advanced Capitalism is often celebrated for it’s miraculous capacity of limitless growth and creative destruction. But that’s not what community is to me. That’s not what truly builds a place up. In my eyes, all of this modernity has a significant downside.

“Bourgeois” is a word that is typically used to reference a perceived value in materialistic things and conventional attitudes. It used to be something that you’d use to describe rich people who owned a lavish amount of possessions. “A rich, bored, bourgeois family.” In more recent times, though, it has very much spilled into being an oft-used term to describe the middle-class. That is exactly what I see when I witness all of the absolute obsession over society’s tendencies to mindlessly bow down to retail marketing and go out and spend all their money on crap they don’t need. I very much see a Bourgeois society.

How did things get this way? How do we save ourselves from this mess that we created? How can we reflect upon our lives, break away from the obsession of consumerism, and take steps to live with a higher purpose?

It starts with the capacity of being able to get beyond our self-deception. We have to be able to see that the negative, self-consuming, evil things, of the world are sometimes rooted right in our own hearts. The ability to do that is what ultimately leads you into being contemplative and reflective about where you are, who you are, where you are going, and what things are truly important to you. Most people aren’t able to come to this realization on their own. A known theologian Karl Barth once said, “We only know sin on the way out.” I mention it now, though, in an effort to make you more conscious.

If you are able to come to this realization, you’ve taken the most important step to change and living with purpose. The first step. You need to have the mindset of “I, myself, am responsible for this and only I can make the decision to change.” The desire that drives that statement is God at work. Then, like a fitness enthusiast who has found a new passion for changing their health and body, you have to carry that mindset with you into everything you do. Sometimes it takes a full blown inner apocalypse in order to redirect yourself to your true purpose and to avoid getting distracted by the temptations that society throws at you on a daily basis.

Often times, people live large chunks of their lives with their true identities lying dormant and hidden. You’ll never find out who you really are until you stop letting society dictate what you should be doing. You have to lose yourself to find yourself.

Living a reflective life, full of purpose, is not achieved by mastering some technique. You have to arrive there by way of simplicity. You have to strip yourself of anything in your life that doesn’t add any nominal value, and then rebuild yourself from the ground up.

You and I are called to live a meaningful life. It’s why God put us here. You can’t let society’s views be your views. You need to decide, for your family and for yourself, what is needed to fulfill that life.

“With people this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:26)

Now go be who you were meant to be.