After watching this video by RSA Animate on Smile or Die by Barbara Ehrenreich, an acclaimed journalist and political activitist, and reading this post on BeyondGrowth, The Paint-by-Numbers Guide to your Creative Self-Actualization, it just reinforces the disservice that the cult of positivity is doing for people trying to do something meaningful with their life.

When bloggers brush off the notion of valid criticism because of a belief that it is negative and instead suggest that their critics just go out and do something, they’re burying their head in the sand and fostering a community of blind faith.  By relying upon positivity even in the face of valid concerns they quell dissent by discrediting their critics via ad hominem (you’re not doing anything positive, so why should I bother listening to you) and removing any responsibility the blogger has to the verifiability of their claims (because if you fail you were obviously not trying hard enough).

This is even more hypocritical when these bloggers then turn around and criticize existing structures as if the realm of personal development and lifestyle design is above such a petty thing like criticism.  This is an all too common sentiment honestly.

“I’m not a big fan of negativity, I think it’s counterproductive and doesn’t help people. I’d never write anything that criticized particular people for the way that they’re doing things.”

“I’m a huge critic of the world we live in. People are being tricked into consuming more than they need by corporations that are destroying the planet. This is a crime, it’s essentially enslaving an entire class of people, and it needs to change.”

Everett Brogue, Far Beyond the Stars

Are we not above such shallow double standards? Apparently not.

As a community lifestyle design is elitist, we criticize others who don’t belong to our community yet believe ourselves above criticism.  Perhaps it is a symptom of the immaturity of the community as a whole.  As I’ve seen and experienced myself as a dancer, there is a point in development where we don’t recognize our ego as being the driving force behind our actions and ignore/lash out at those who would point it out to us yet in turn it is perhaps the most important thing to recognize; it is the mark of a young dancer coming into their own.  Perhaps it is the same for lifestyle design.

We can’t hide behind a shallow, and ultimately false, misinterpretation of philosophical relativism that absolves us of responsibility to the world of communities, people and environment we are part of.  Rather we must take a cue from developed disciplines and engage in a conversational exploration of the deeper meanings that lifestyle design can bring to the table as a community and leave the regurgitation of list posts and shallow explorations into minimalism, marketing and business for something meaningful and engaged with the world.

This was originally entitled “Do We Pretend to Be Lifestyle Rockstars” and was posted on Slacker Reform.  I’ve dug it out of the archives and reworked it for a broader audience.

We’re a bit of an overachieving generation and community. We want to live exciting world-changing different-country-every-four-months in a single suitcase template-free lives. We want to launch the next big startup and inspire the next social movement.

We can slip into this idea that we’re Rockstars (guitars not included).

Yet we can’t be rockstars all the time, nor should we want to be. The interesting rockstars in most fields are honest, down to earth, simple people who just happen to have worked their ass off to get where they are. Sure they’ve gotten their hands dirty and possess a bit of flair which makes them remarkable but is that all?

Surely not.

They worked one or three jobs while creating their art on their own time, without the presupposition that it would one day become their livelihood.

Working a job or pursuing a career is not anathema to pursuing your passion and art. Rather they are intermingled, feeding and benefiting each other. Use your work as a place to grow and develop skills you can use to leverage your passion and art. Use your passion and art to inspire your work, to give it that personal creative edge.

They gave away more value and exposure to others than they ever asked for themselves.

Giving away value and highlighting others accomplishments is not just the generous (freemium) model that marketers make it out to be. By giving away value you test new ideas in the wild, become an information resource, and reach a far larger audience than if you strictly controlled your content. Highlighting others gives credit where credit is due, enmeshes you deeper into a community of peers and expands the pool (instead of cutting it into pieces).

They believed in their idea when it wasn’t popular, when their friends thought they were crazy and they still struggled to maintain momentum when they woke up everyday.

Believing in yourself when it is only your idea is a hard thing to do, yet when we make it (in some form or another) we should not flaunt our idea as if it were better than sliced bread. Despite how remarkable your lifestyle is, how fantastic your product may be, or how many countries you’ve visited, there are millions of other people in the world living exceptionally happy lives that are entirely different from your own.

Being a social media expert, guru, entrepreneur or change agent is not necessarily the better life choice, it is merely the most fulfilling for your place in your life at this moment. The world might come around in the long run to agree with you but you can’t change peoples minds you can only sway those who are already looking for change.

So while you may be a rockstar in your positive thinking, startup, location independent mind it’s good to take a reality check sometimes and realize that on occasion you’re only playing the air guitar.

“We grow a little every time we do not take advantage of somebody’s weakness.”

- Bern Williams

There are a number of bloggers and internet marketers that make piles of money from affiliate marketing.  In each niche you’ll find someone selling someone else’s product and you can easily find entire blogs developed only to sell a certain product with content that is generic and manufactured to only drive traffic.

If you’re interested, you can find whole marketplaces devoted to finding products you can sell for other people with – ClickBank is one of the most well known.  These marketplaces include a variety of analytics on each product so you can search for the highest selling and converting products.

My problem with this: you can go about selling a product you’ve never even bothered to try or learn more about.

Play the market like a game: find the highest gravity products, tie some lean mean sales page to an article-spun blog, build an AdWords campaigns, build a list and run a few hard sells with long form copy that your program provides for you and start waiting for the money to show up in your account.

But have you seen some of these products?  Have you taken a long hard look at what you are selling?

Are you providing real value to your customers or are you just feeding them get rich quick schemes, weight loss secrets, and all-natural enhancements?

There is a prevalence of those in the lifestyle design community whose main goal it is to put themselves above the petty world of work by offloading it to underpaid VAs and selling products no one really needs to individuals who are desperate for a magic bullet.  For these people affiliate marketing endeavors with hard sell long form copy are a godsend.

It frees them from having to create something meaningful in the world.

To skip the anti-capitalist rhetoric, which I’m not entirely for or against, the real question becomes is it a conscious and mindful act in the world?

Are you selling widgets in digital form?

There’s already a glut of junk in the world, do we need to fill the digital world with garbage as well?

Or can we create a digital landscape in which value-heavy products are created by caring, sustainable businesses that act in the good will of their community?

Flickr photo by peterkaminski.