Purchasing Self-Expression: The Perfect Perpetual Industry

I had an experience in my life where I moved from a corporate office environment in Canada, to a farm in South Africa, and then to a mountain town in Panama where I work from home. With these changes came some serious wardrobe changes, where my clothes from one environment were pretty much useless in the next one.

The interesting thing I noted was how the clothing and accessory changes changed my experience of myself. Where, in the office I would be quite fancy, with jewelry that matched my outfit, hair done, sometimes even with the nails and definitely makeup. I felt quite glamorous and professional, and a fresh new outfit would have me walking into the office full of confidence.

On the farm and in Panama, my clothing became purely practical. I noticed I felt I was now lacking certain experiences. I felt less confident, slower and less vibrant. I had to learn how to live these expressions now in Who I Was, because I could no longer simply purchase them from a store.  

With the glamour point which links in to the consumerism point, for me what I see is where an entire industry has been built around people seeking to fulfill desires – desires which have arisen from us not accepting and allowing ourselves to live certain expressions, and so separating ourselves from those expressions, leaving us feeling ‘unfulfilled’.

We then seek to fulfill ourselves through the experience a product or lifestyle (or any external experience) will apparently give us, which will obviously never be enough as we are not living it for ourselves. So we keep bouncing back and forth from one polarity to the other – from fulfilled (only temporarily as an experience) to unfulfilled (the reality of Self through separating Self from living self-expression) – thus creating the perfect industry: the more money you have, the more you can spend on attempting fulfillment. The more glamour in this case, the more the person is showing how unfulfilled they actually are, and so have to keep paying to keep the feeding the experience.

The cool part is that you can look at what desire the product represents that we are seeking to fulfill, and then see how that can be lived as a living expression of Self instead, thus creating actual self-fulfillment – where glamour can then become an act self-expression (which means if it were lost or taken away, we would not change).

The not so cool part is that until we fulfill ourselves as living expressions, we will be consumers of experience, consuming Life as the resources of the earth in self-interest as we seek to fulfill our desires that we ourselves created in the first place through separation.