Let's ditch debt and failure - can't be that hard, right?

Popularity. Wealth. Inclusion. Adoration. Leadership. Respect. Atractiveness, Confidence.

We fight to win these things into our lives from day to day. One can argue the virtue or absence of virtue of pursuing any of them, but they are our – specifically Americans’ – favorite things. The media, through a relentless feed of ideas about how food, money, social success and exterior beauty are better companions than we are to ourselves, glues our gaze to these objectives.

Our gaze and our dollars, and hey, we enjoy it. It feels good to be a perpetual customer, always courted by advertisers. There is always someone waiting to fill an empty moment with words about how your life could improve by buying, or empty space with the objects themselves to buy. Life is a service waiting to be bought.

But it is also a problem. A recent article in the NY Times reported that Americans are saving 7.6 percent less money annually than they did in 1968, and have gained 22 percent more debt than they had in the year 2000.


I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with having a full material life. If buying makes you happy, then go and buy! Yet, not the same things all of the time, please. Americans are genius shoppers when they have their eyes open to their own needs.

Consider this quote from the blog of the CEO of United Capital Investment Advisors, Inc., which manages over $8 billion in client assets:

Investment decisions should reflect the assumption that extraordinary and unpredictable events are not the norm, and can create new investment opportunities. Without a doubt, there are times when market behavior is painful – but investors who avoid emotional responses and look at events from a historical perspective will often find that their patience is rewarded.

In my life, I want more than the choice of what to buy. I want the choice whether to buy, and when to buy. I want the numbers on my bills to reflect myself, my decisions, me in purposeful relation to objects. I want that independent orientation to the world called an ethical stance.

How do I buy that?

At the core of the American mind, I believe, there is a deep desire to escape to the past. We want to return to the freedom of behavior that came from our original loyalty to ethical intelligence. The intelligence that drove the penning of the Declaration of Independence, that has enabled us to expand minority rights over and over again, that brought us through the sweat-beaded desperation of the Cold War.

We want the past back because we’ve fallen apart, as is our inclination as a diverse and 300 million-person nation. Our past has shown that there are other ways to improve our lives than to buy more things, become more popular or win personal glory.

Yet our present attitude reveals none of that past teaching. Our reasoning about self-improvement may as well have been taken from Baldesar Castiglione’s medieval dialogue on ethics, How to Achieve True Greatness, in which a character comments:

‘As for me, I have very seldom known men who are any good at anything who do not praise themselves. It seems to me that it is only right to allow them to do so, since, when a man who knows he is of some worth sees what he is doing is being ignored, he grows angry at the way his qualities are hidden from sight and is forced to reveal them in some way lest he be cheated of the honour which is the rightful reward for virtuous endeavour.”

We want to have a fair market in terms of character. We deserve credit. We have been good; the government has been bad. If a bad government refuses to reward good people, what are the people to do?

Buy, on imaginary credit. But this isn’t working for the average American household, which is in $8,565 of debt, according to a blog on ZDNet.com. It doesn’t make sense to praise ourselves now. There is little chance of becoming an ethical hero to yourself while there is a tower of debt threatening to crash on your head.

Americans, by definition, have a choice in how to be and what to be. In denying our own failures, we lose and have lost the ability to choose a path of success. We are in debt to our authentically chosen being.

A friend said to me recently while lifting weights, “You know that feeling when you set a goal, and then you can’t do it? I hate that feeling more than anything else in the world.” That feeling is what debtors can use to become debt-free. “Yeah,” I responded to my friend’s comment. At a previous point in my life, I would have said back “Well, every failure leads to a new kind of success,” or “You’re the only one judging yourself.” I don’t believe those things anymore.

I propose a new approach. We need to decide from our failures how we have been unfaithful to ourselves, and stop being that way. If we include our government in that self, we have more hope of returning to government that seems fair.

Instead, I choose to let go of thinking about my failures. They are my failures. I’m not going to fix them, because they are over.

Instead, I am going to pay off the debt I owe to my interior life – to my ethical intelligence – by abandoning the idea that I have to improve upon anything. My life is about more than buying an identity. It’s about responding to the world with a moral flexibility that allows for improvement in undetermined directions.