We live in a modern world where the world pretty much slices and dices us. Just take a look at how marketing and political persuasion are done.
If you’re trying to get some sort of political message across, you dig into the demographic of the audience you’re trying to reach: their age range, gender distribution, occupation, and average level of education attainment. These are the types of questions that separate people and put them in a grid. Once you have a clear idea of this grid, you position to address these people on an emotional, personal and financial level.
This makes a lot of sense. Different people with similar intersections of demographic traits do tend to share some similarities regarding political views and social, economic, and political concerns. How can they not? They see certain aspects of reality together. This can lead to the same conclusions. Again, I speak in general terms here. While there are always exceptions to the rule, this is how things normally pan out. People are, by and large, creatures of their experiences. You can never discount the impact of environment on people. While this does not necessarily mean they are totally blank slates, what one experiences through life can and does have a big impact on how that person sees the world and how that person thinks things should be done.
The same applies to marketing. Believe it or not, when you log in to Facebook, it spies on you not only by paying attention to the stuff that you like and the topics that you comment on, but also based on your ad clicks. They then start showing you ads based on its best guess of what you are interested in. This is only possible through a series of highly complicated calculations to show and to get the right ads into the right people.
This is just a symptom of the fact that modern human existence, at least in the western world, is fragmented. It’s rare for people to talk about other people as complete individuals. They either referred to a larger group that you’re a part of, or based on what you can contribute in terms of one key aspect of your life: your ability to make money, to give of your time, or your talent.
Whatever the case maybe, people don’t really consider each other a complete, self-sustaining, integral and comprehensive self-enclosed being. There’s a reason why anti-hypertensive, anti-anxiety, and anti-depressant medications are always on the top five of legal prescription drugs year after year in the West. At some level, we are sick, as a society.
This is what wellness and wholeness tries to address. A holistic approach wellness that addresses the whole person. Human beings are unbelievably complex; it goes a long way to truly address the human condition. Isn’t it time we start addressing our wellness issues from this perspective?
We have to stop looking at ourselves as some flat, monolithic, one-dimensional cartoon. Unfortunately, that’s how the medical industrial complex views human beings. You only need to look at drug addiction rates, drug addiction divorce, suicide and other indices of personal and social dysfunction to see that there is something fundamentally wrong. Wholeness gets to the heart of this. We need it collectively and you need it individually.
