My Reaction To NewAge (Is Also A Product Of NewAge)

Today, I'm saluting what-we're-being-sold-as America's "extended family".

From the Self-Help world, I see Dr. Joyce Brothers has died:

When asked why the public was hungry for personal advice from a public person, she proposed that an increasingly mobile society had heightened feelings of isolation. 

"There is a lot more searching for answers these days," Brothers told the Washington Post in 1979. "And a lot more answers too. But we're missing friends and kinship roles. So you rent a friend. Like Dr. Joyce Brothers." 

...One demographic that did not seek her advice was her own family. 

"She totally loses her objectivity," her husband told UPI in 1985. "With her family, she's abysmal."

 

 Speaking as someone who's been somewhat isolated my whole life, even when I had a choice, I'd never gone in for that "rent a friend" stuff. I mean, first of all, if you want 'em, real ones are free. (I know - wha?) Second, if you're renting 'em, they're going to tend to agree with you, right or wrong, right-right? Real friends don't do that. My friends and I argue, over the phone, about what we're wearing.

(Like I said, they're free,...)

   

 So - ruminating on the hidden fragility of the family unit vs. the obvious strength engendered in true friendships - what's the possibility of there having been some gravitational pull between A) the selling of circular reasoning by the "abysmal" B) a train wreck, and C) that train just happening to loop back on the blood relatives of the "extended family" they were unwittingly forced into?

As I've been saying for a while now, when it comes to social disaster, most roads lead to Oprah:

Readers don’t pick up self-help books just to ruminate on life’s dilemmas, but to be guided to solutions. The new series of self-help books published by the London-based School of Life, co-founded by the Swiss-born popular philosopher Alain de Botton, echoes the school’s lofty approach to problems, claiming to be “intelligent, rigorous, well-written new guides to everyday living.” Yet to peruse the School of Life’s calendar of classes is to fall into a vortex of jargon pitched somewhere between the banal banter of daytime talk shows and the schedule for a nightmarish New Age retreat,...

 

 This is the upside-down world of NewAge "Friends" - TV shows, talk shows, Facebook - today. Because, would any "friend" be allowed to buy into this nonsense, on the scale it's been, knowing we've got to look at each other tomorrow? Not around here.

Here's the true family reality:

Somewhere, deep down inside, Brad Pitt's wife, Jennifer Aniston, is doing the Snoopy dance - not because Angelina Jolie wasn't held down and abused by misogynistic male physicians - but, with Jolie having announced her breast removal was "My Medical Choice", it's also a pretty good guess it wasn't anything Anniston's husband, Brad, was counseled, or counting on, either.

That's the Self-Helped now.

 

Then there's also the unforgettable issue of Jolie's procedure being insufficiently homeopathic, but then, none of what's transpired - starting with Pitt originally leaving mega-NewAger Gwyneth Paltrow for Aniston - jibes with NewAge's stated purposes (there are many) or even the claims it's participants make about how they live their lives.

Forget friends and family, considering the sadism, I have to wonder, how do they sleep?

The Easy Answer:

 Like (the adulterous) Bill Clinton, to the words of "rent a friend" Ken Wilber.

 

I tell ya, they're everywhere.

It just occurred to me that, even knowing Jolie is a U.N. ambassador, this medical operation is the most significant thing the regularly-voted "Most Beautiful" actress in the world has ever done to garner respect in it.

That's absolutely insane.

It's no wonder so many stick to merely making money:

With so many "helping" this path to enlightenment stuff can be hard,...