Enough is Enough

My cup runneth over…

Whitney’s words drifted into my mind as I sat down to write this..:

I believe that children are our future

Teach them well and let them lead the way

Show them all the beauty they possess inside

Give them a sense of pride to make it easier

Let the children's laughter remind us how we used to be.

Everybody's searching for a hero

People need someone to look up to

And it made me wonder, who is teaching our children when enough is enough?

I used to hear this phrase a lot growing up, probably because I was a greedy kid who loved food and would happily gorge myself if given full access to the crisp cupboard or the chocolate box.

When I look around, I see a frustrating lack of guidance for kids (or anyone!) on how to resist one’s urges. Rather, to the contrary, when it comes to food in particular, we are urged that we are “worth it”, have “earned it” (the recent Uber Eats ad springs to mind), or reminded how weak-willed we are in the face of temptation (You’re Not You When You’re Hungry - Snickers bar ad).

As humans, we justify our cravings, choices, and behaviours with all kinds of reasoning, and advertisers know this. Media supports the ads in the way that copy is written to encourage polarised thinking and press on insecurities like bruises on fruit, easily piercing through to our egos.

So if we aren’t teaching kids how much is enough, because we are dopamine hunting through our devices all the time, and the content that reaches them encourages them to indulge themselves at all times, how can we be surprised when they grow up and become materialistic junkies always searching for another hit of self-satisfaction?

This has been a trickle-down from the baby boomers who felt so deprived in their childhood that when they could hoard, they did, and they passed on their hoarding tendencies to their kin, whose houses became so overstuffed they had to Marie Kondo out of their self-created hellscape and start the whole sorry business again. Luckily for Ikea.

Now we have a society where capitalism and consumerism rule; where status is measured in muscles, tattoos and zeros for men, and grooming, youth and thinness for women, and everyone wondering how the hell we got here?

The answer is, as with everything, patriarchy. The patriarchal system pits men against one another, forever stuck in a competition (that neither signed up for) in order to feel good about themselves; lonely, ignored and bored. It subjugates women into the role of caregivers of men, with no other agency or purpose for existence other than to satisfy the whims and desires of men, leaving them feeling disrespected, exploited and worthless.

Everyone loses from patriarchy EXCEPT the 1%. They are laughing at us as we scramble to figure out the game.

The only way out is to stop playing entirely … 

To Be Continued….

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