I normally listen to NPR while I do my morning yoga, stretches, and calisthenics. Six days a week it’s news, but sometimes on Sundays I catch some motivation program named something like “Humankind.” They interview various “spiritual advisers” and “life coaches” who use a lot of elusive terms like “inner voices” and “true destiny.” They want us to meditate and to “settle with ourselves,” or to “achieve calm within.”

When I add up everything they say, it totals nothing. But I can see how they manage to get clients to pony up money to listen to them. A lot of Americans, especially those from the more-or-less affluent middle class, think they really need someone help them “find meaning.”

I think rich people don’t subscribe to spiritualism because they think they already have a purpose: getting richer. Poor people don’t seek “meaning” because they don’t have time. But it’s not hard to see why those in the middle would feel this need. They feel a genuine lack, something they should have that they have possibly lost.

Actually, they’re right.

We start losing our natural sense of purpose as soon as we enter modern society. That’s because our purpose is to help one another, and society in America as we know it is dead set against that purpose. Our society sets us against one another. It tells us to look out, to compete, and to vanquish the very people that we would have cared about if we weren’t twisted away as we are.

If anyone needed an example, look at our education. From kindergarten through graduate school, we compete for grades. The only way to be top of the class is to have everyone else beneath. We may never acknowledge it, but it’s how the system works. It’s not just the schools. It’s our jobs, too. We compete with everybody else for promotions, for raises, and for the best assignments.

At the grocery, we compete for the best products, the lowest prices, and the fastest check-out lines. On the streets, we have to make time by getting ahead of other drivers. It’s a rat race everywhere, and we’re the rats.

Once we’re aware of our forced alienation, we begin to find ways to fight back against it. It’s not like we have discovered a purpose; we always had one but we were purposefully driven away from it. To get back to caring for one another, as evolution created us to do, we have to fight.

We have to figure out how to fight alienation for ourselves. Life coaches won’t tell us.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON’s “Workers Beat” program 89.3 FM in Dallas at 9 AM Central Time every Saturday. They podcast it on Itunes. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site.