"Things" Won't Make You Feel Good, Only You Can Do That

 

Stop looking for fulfilment in all the wrong places.

“Things” will never make you feel good.

The only way you can ever feel good about yourself, is if you satisfy your inner needs and nurture yourself from the inside out.

But first of all, you have to get to grips with the big lie that is consumerism. Only then, will you understand that the world is not built to make you feel good about yourself, that’s your job.

Inferiority Sells

Let me just be frank for a moment – other people, the media, big corporations, all will at times, attempt to make you feel inferior.

The ads you see every day that give you the illusion that you’re not yet good enough – you need “this” product to make you prettier, “that” product to give you more substance – they are there to sell.

Consumerism works by making us believe that if what we have, is not society’s vision for it, then we are not good enough. It also heavily spreads the belief that we need more in order to be fulfilled.

My eyes have been opened to this progressively over the last few years, especially since I spent a year in Asia where consumerism hasn’t quite caught up to the pace of Western society.

I now notice things that I wasn’t so aware of before, like the idea that has been created about body hair – that we, especially women, shouldn’t have any. It sells. It sells razors, it sells beauty treatments and it sells all different kinds of products.

Of course it should be personal choice whether or not we choose to keep our body hair. But we’ve been conditioned to believe that women with body hair are unclean and unattractive…. because it sells.

That’s just one example – there are hundreds, in fact thousands!

Did you know that a PR pioneer called Edward Bernays was hired by the American Tobacco Company to persuade women to smoke, at a time when it was still very taboo for women to smoke in public? He came up with the idea that if women smoked in public, they would appear rebellious, independent and would become more powerful. Manipulation at its finest, and it sold. Bernays was was paid $25,000 for his successful work.

These damaging forms of consumerisation have been operating for decades upon decades.

If we were to feel good about ourselves as we are, we would buy a lot less stuff and would buy into a lot less ideas, and so inferiority sells.

Don’t Buy Into the Lie 

Consumerism has gotten worse in recent years, largely because it is heightened by social media.

Many Facebook and Instagram posts unknowingly assist in the drive towards selling. We see something that someone has – a car, a piece of furniture, item of clothing – and we let ourselves believe that if we too could own that product, we would feel better about ourselves.

And then we compare – we look at what others own and compare it to what we own, if ours is less, we make up a lie that we are less. Less than enough. We allow ourselves to believe that the exterior of our lives defines us.

But in actual fact, it’s one big lie…

It’s like we are all in a race to buy things that become meaningless the moment we buy them. We feel that we need them but once we have them, we don’t feel any different.

Things cannot make us feel better. Sure they can give us a moment of excitement, but they can’t provide true satisfaction.

I encourage you to wake up to the lie of consumerism and begin to learn that you can be truly satisfied if you learn to accept yourself as you are – without needing more “things”.

Self-Love Is Not For Sale

No amounts of cash will fulfil your inner needs, and this very fact is what makes you rich. Rich with resources that you don’t need money to pay for.

Learn that who you are, isn’t made up of what’s on the outside. The exterior of your life is a tiny representation of you. Look within to seek fulfilment, and there you will find it.

You certainly won’t find it by comparing, so stop doing things that make you feel as though you are not good enough. Comparison is the biggest culprit!

Refuse to measure yourself up against what others look like, what they own, or how their lives appear. The filtered life you are looking at from behind a screen, is a very skewed version of the true reality, so take off those rose-tinted glasses and stop thinking everyone else’s life is better than yours.

Be your biggest supporter, and know that you don’t need more in order to be fulfilled, you just need to remind yourself of your worth.

You are a perfectly imperfect individual with unique traits and gifts, and there will never be anyone quite like you, so never allow yourself to feel less than anyone else because you are enough. You just have to start believing it!

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