The pedestrian diatribe that follows fails to explain much, away from old tired grounds. It comes from a Chair of Philosophy in New York and part time Professor at a university in the Netherlands plus a famous psychoanalyst.

Their essay has fallen into the mundane pit of simplistic summation, of a very complex present shift in humanity's invention of purpose... The book may be more detailed of course:

The booming self-help industry, not to mention the cash cow of New Age spirituality, has one message: be authentic! Charming as American optimism may be, its 21st-century incarnation as the search for authenticity deserves pause. The power of this new version of the American dream can be felt through the stridency of its imperatives: Live fully! Realize yourself! Be connected! Achieve well-being!

Despite the frequent claim that we are living in a secular age defined by the death of God, many citizens in rich Western democracies have merely switched one notion of God for another — abandoning their singular, omnipotent (Christian or Judaic or whatever) deity reigning over all humankind and replacing it with a weak but all-pervasive idea of spirituality tied to a personal ethic of authenticity and a liturgy of inwardness. The latter does not make the exorbitant moral demands of traditional religions, which impose bad conscience, guilt, sin, sexual inhibition and the rest.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/29/the-gospel-according-to-me/?_r=0

Blah blah blah...

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No matter what we do, we are at the mercy of deceit and at our own ability to be deceitful, to others and to our self. Whether we look at our own navel or that of a god, we relatively have to find an illusion of purpose, since we have modified and codified our natural urges into social constructs that serves us well, in general. And if some people find solace in self-help while other profit from it, so be it... This was my beef with Alain de Botton who seemed to disregard people having a good time in a pub as missing out on life's other experiences...

This is not to say that we cannot live without illusions or targeted purpose, but the human lot has evolved into devising artifices to explain what we don't know while we're doing something. Trying to find something "authentic" within us can be quite stupid, sure, though we can exist well individually without this notion of authenticity but with an understanding of who we might be in relation to others and within. 

We are all coming from various experiences and different levels of education as well as a different way in the absorption of these — bio-mechanically and psychologically ... We survive from a state of complete dependency as a child, within a bracketed shelter of information, in which most of us can operate satisfactorily in, whether the information is correct or not. Should we step out of this safe gamut, we can experience some distress, stepping into unknown territory away from our comfort zone... We might discover a new world that has been hidden from us — sometimes hidden by prejudices, sometimes hidden to protect us but often to protect the tight-arse social construct or a religious dogma.

For centuries, our "comfort reactive" zone has been carefully maintained by religion... 

War, pestilence and our misfortune were strongly related to "our" sins... Religion has made many of us to behave according to the rules of such dogma. Even if we trespassed, we were still attached to the umbilical cord of the "morality" and the purpose of the unworthy-self belonging to a greater creator being.

Since the 18th century, more philosophers have explored the concept of non-theism... With the advent of the industrial revolution and the development of gadgets, we also have suddenly freed ourselves from a strong form of singular slavery devoted to work and church, to be caught in a new state of being, in which entertainment has become somewhat paramount... This is an iffy stage of our singular and social evolution in which relative choices have to be made with no absolute illusion of purpose. We are now the master of our cosmic destiny, individually and socially... Forget spirituality... I don't dig spirituality. 

The Church of course has used repeated arcane theatrics as a powerful display to retain the attention of crowds with deep thoughts in which we become humbly not worthy of whatever. We became submissive. 

But the religious threat of hell has now been replace with that of "universal" love, because the concept of "hell" was loosing traction with too many people... people now used to see far worse images than hell on their TVs while playing games of doom or whatever... 

And we also discovered that being submissive had often been retarding our access to a better station in "real" life. We thus developed cleared stronger ambitions... We discovered ways, such as meditation, to manage angst and guilt — lousy emotions that can make our life miserable. We discovered that happiness was not a seat in an unfathomable paradise when we die after a life of misery, but happiness could be sought in the now-living — with management of our emotions and ideas that sustain our chosen purpose, in which joy can be had for the simple reason of being alive... Nothing wrong with this.

In all of this, of course — as I have mentioned on this site in several essays — we have to minimise pain and raise our awareness of contentment, while avoid mixing the two feelings into sadism and masochistic tendencies... More often than we care to accept, this line is often crossed, as we create excuses to inflict pain (torture) on others and/or indulge in addictive drugs that provide short momentary elation, but a life of pain and disorientation...

Here comes several stylistic notions... Our "modern" social constructs have underhandedly codified our sense of beauty, our ability to do things and the concept of ownership. This is where for example the new NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme) is a strong powerful new social idea. It should force us to recognise that not every one has equal opportunity, but everyone need equal survival rights. 

Beauty is a very iffy game of presentation to one self and to others which is defined by touted bio-metric appearances plus touch ups such as hair styles, make-up and shaving... I have know people who had not been served well in this stylistic appreciation of how beautiful we are. 

Our ability to do things can also be limiting our choices. All this can thus have an effect on our ability to acquire stuff (ownership)... 

To a great extend, this area of "disability" has been the greater province of charity, in which our compassion might have been limited to a specific area of observed need... The NDIS is not a replacement of this but an extension of the social greater recognition that everyone needs to be promoted as a dignified and "participating" level into the system... In the past on many occasions, our disadvantaged were hidden or exploited as freaks, or derided, even if individually we were generously supportive... Sexism and racism are also part of this stylistic denigration... 

Sometimes we could be in an inferior position where people with sociopathic tendencies are treating us badly... They walk over us, sometimes in order to stay in their position, sometimes because they can. Under such assault, we could revolt, but unless we have massive numbers, we're doomed to be ejected from our own seat, thus we seek self-protection in our own self — a self that can become like a bastion against pressure from other people...

The awakening of our individuality, on a mass-scale these days (in the past, there were a few individuals with massive egos who took over the purpose of the social existence — rulers, kings, popes and other individuals who tricked us into believing their god-given individual rights to be in charge) has changed the dynamics of the social network somewhat... 

More "authentic" self?... Nupe... It is basically impossible to be "authentic" in the sense or "original" since all of who we are is what we have learnt, experienced and our reactions to such, plus a self-concocted purpose that tend to fit in. Thus we are more often than not the products of our environment — social, economic and natural.... The social environment is presently encouraging "authentic" individualism in order for us to consume products. In the past, we were individuals in a group in which we had to perform mostly hard labour under the illusion of god's wrath. Now we can perform many more things under the illusion of serving our own individuality... Nothing wrong with this. At least we can, subconsciously or consciously, create an image of our self for our self, an image that we can enjoy comfortably.

Our individuality has been made far more complex these days than say that of a farmer in the 12th century... He/she knew stuff about the earth and the seasons that we don't need to know but we have delegated this fast-increasing knowledge to specialists, many of which work now in labs... 

We also are now constantly bombarded by conflicting strongly infused information... Advertising is there to make us loose our grip on our habits or to reinforce the ones advertising chooses... Individuality needs to stay focused and understand of the illusions and the choice of such in which we are happy to wade in. 

We need to understand that should we not contribute to the social effort, we could be viewed as an individualistic prick... Should we spend more time in front of the mirror to admire our self, rather than preen for the benefit of others' well-being and with the purpose of engaging a relationship, we can be called a narcissistic prick.

It's that simple. And yet it's very complex to come to terms with understanding our relationships with new toys, other people and their desires, and our self while steering away from the clutches of a religious dogma. Now, in order to maintain relationships in which we decide the value of commitment and agreement, we might need to reach a level of acceptance in which morality is replaced by a kinder humanism in which we feel "happy" with the choice, without any regret... It can be confronting though as there are no exact rules to follow except our understanding we should not hurt anyone and manage our environment carefully to protect it from humanity's relentless rampaging demands...

Narcissistic individualism is not good for the social construct. Sharing humanity while retaining our individuality is the challenge. Religion will fight you on this turf... Religion has lost a lot of ground though it tries harder and harder to maintain the illusion in all its formats...

And please stop texting while driving...

Meanwhile some "scientific" luminaries are trying to marry oil and water yet again... Religion with science, in order to bring back the divine purpose into the universe... Not new but silly nonetheless...:

Stem cell biologist Bruce Lipton had a Eureka moment when he realised the believing mind could change the body's cells and turn thought patterns into 'miracle working' energy. Building bridges between science and spirit, Lipton believes we are on the brink of a new spiritual order that was signalled by the Mayan Calendar which came to an end in 2012.

Research Psychologist, Peter B Todd also looks forward to a post-Christian theology that incorporates the spiritual and scientific discoveries of the contemporary world. Referring to Carl Jung's concepts of the God Self, the Unconscious and the Cosmic Consciousness, Todd links them to insights drawn from physics and the evolutionary thought of Jesuit priest and palaeontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The result is a 'mystical' holistic vision of interconnectedness that embraces all forms of life.

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/spiritofthings/new-beliefs-for-a-new-millennium/4775964

Pierre Theillard de Chardin got it completely wrong... He was formulating a universe spiralling back unto itself towards its godly centre. We all should know by now that scientifically expressed, the universe is thinning itself, accelerating outwards into nothingness... 

The Mayans may have run out of stone on which to write the next time-cycle or they might have thought the next instalment was to be written by another generation hence. 

Embracing all forms of life is not a new brain-storm idea... It's as obvious as the sun rises and sets daily for sidereal interaction between celestial bodies. There is no mystic... only evolution within a bracketed time frame — evolution that has been restricted or enhanced at times by accidental yet narrowly banded environmental factors. As well as evolution there has been life-forms that did not cut it further (extinction), either due to changing environmental factors or due to regressive form of unsustainable self-natural change... 

We do not have to be strongly existential or atheistic in order to devise a better survival... But we need to understand our own influences, good or bad, on the environmental factors in which we can only survive... 

The band of survival is quite narrow on this planet and has been maintained with variations, remarkably serendipitously for a very long time — a few billion years... We're lucky that most of the water is on the surface and thus tempers the climatic conditions. The range of complex sustained-life on earth lies between freezing and about 55 degrees Celsius max... The surface of all other planets in the solar system are totally outside these limits. But should we be after comforts as we know, we should not be overcooking it as we are doing now...

Gus Leonisky