The Shadow of Vanity
It affects us all
The issue is that many of us don’t know that we’re lost in our shadow of vanity.
We don’t know that we’re driven by our desperate need to escape the oppression of our childhood upbringing.
And it’s all driven by the addiction to our drama.
“Wake me up when it’s all over, I didn’t know I was lost,” is an expression of this shadow of vanity that’s hidden away, that drives our addiction to drama.
My parent’s addiction to their own drama from their shadow of vanity manifested itself in narcissistic behaviours, and then as they matured, it gave them the perspective they needed to realise how they had behaved in the past. That they could mature to reach that perspective indicates that they were not narcissists. I know for sure because about three months before he passed away my father made a full and frank apology to me for his harsh treatment of me during my childhood.
My mother too recognised her own shadows, and seeing how distressed and lost I was in my first marriage, she gave me her full unconditional loving support when I decided that I was going to separate from my first wife.
With this benefit of hindsight, I recognise that a lot of the close friends that I made at university were equally as addicted to drama as I was. Sadly, some of the close friends who had such an amazing spark of vitality and joy in escaping their childhood oppression have died way before their time.
They died because the oblivion of alcohol, cigarettes, cocaine, and heroin was so attractive that it killed them. The ones who chose heroin died in their 30s. For the ones that survived those addictions, when later in life the early cancer diagnosis came, they didn’t bother to fight and died before they finished their 40s.
They just surrendered and died in the hospice alongside others who were forty or fifty years older than them because it was a way out of the anxiety and depression that they felt. They died because their shadow of vanity had them lost in the darkness.
There are many amazing poems written about death, but the poetry that inspires me every time I hear it, spoken aloud by my great friend Hillel Benedykt, is the following reading from the Book of Ecclesiastes:
Ecclesiastes 12.1-8
Remember your creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come, and the years draw near when you will say, ‘I have no pleasure in them’; before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return with the rain; on the day when the guards of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent, and the women who grind cease working because they are few, and those who look through the windows see dimly; when the doors on the street are shut, and the sound of the grinding is low, and one rises up at the sound of a bird, and all the daughters of song are brought low; when one is afraid of heights, and terrors are in the road; the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags itself along and desire fails; because all must go to their eternal home, and the mourners will go about the streets; before the silver cord is snapped, and the golden bowl is broken, and the pitcher is broken at the fountain, and the wheel broken at the cistern, and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the breath returns to God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher; all is vanity.
What my wonderful friends got by surrendering so easily to oblivion was freedom from the shadow of vanity.
“What is the shadow of vanity?”
The shadow of vanity is trying to live up to the expectations of parents who had been damaged by their own upbringing. They and their previous generations struggled to survive through oppression, starvation, grief, hardship, and guilt from the 20th century and further back.
What my university friends shone with was the burning joy of escaping their childhood oppression, but once that energy had passed they found themselves still trapped by the shadows of vanity that they still carried within them.
The shadow of desperately trying to make their parents love them. Parents who used withholding their love from their children as a weapon to motivate their children to live up to their vain expectations.
We all have these shadows within us - where we have adopted limiting beliefs in our childhood that if we can just do something, be something, or have something that meets the expectation of our parents then they will love us.
This is our shadow of vanity.
I’m not talking about trauma here. “Trauma-informed” has been a buzzword in the coaching community for a while now, but from my perspective, you’re either a clinical psychologist with a master’s degree and a professional specialization in trauma treatment or you’re not. This qualifies that person to make that kind of diagnosis.
The 20 years of training and experience I have is in emotional clearing and belief systems and if I come across someone who appears that they might have a severe disorder, that may be trauma-related, then I refer to professionals who have the experience and I’ve done this several times over the last five years.
There too are many who are so quick to label others to create more clickbait drama on Instagram and Tiktok. Labels such as ‘narcissist’, ‘stable genius’, and ‘trauma’ are frequently and rapidly used by people labelling others or themselves without being qualified to do so.
Our shadow of vanity is our unconscious belief that we will be loved if we meet the arbitrary and unfair conditions for love as our inner child interpreted the behaviours of our immature parents at the time.
Our path to freedom is releasing these limiting beliefs that are hidden in our shadow of vanity, and the death of the drama that we create from these shadows.
No one is immune to this.
Every single billionaire on earth today has got to that position driven by the shadow of vanity of themselves and their parents and ancestors, and they are living in the drama of that shadow.
Globally, the addiction to drama has been causing wars that go back thousands of years, and some of the killing that is happening today is the result of ongoing feuds between tribes in the Middle-East and between tribes in Europe that pre-date King Solomon.
If we look at the European tribes and the German royal family that was adopted by Britain, Prince Harry appears to have escaped the drama of his own family, but it would appear that he’s just swapped one set of family drama for another.
If you consider that the Treaty of Versailles at the end of WWI set up the conditions for the second one, then the period of peace between them was really just a pause for the European tribes to regroup and rearm.
The 20th-century feuding between the cousins in the European royal families caused two world wars and cost the lives of millions. The war in Ukraine could be considered to be a continuation of that European conflict between these very same tribes.
In Australia, Gina Rinehart has had some dramatic struggles with her own family to maintain control of the family assets. The sycophantic Australian politicians that attend her are fully part of the ongoing drama that she creates.
The recent announcement that she’s relocating her investments from Australia to the off-shore is being used as a political football to cause drama - including calling her the ‘Queen of Australia’.
The coercive argument being dramatised, is that she’ll bring her money back if there’s a change of government. If Gina Rinehart does take her investments off-shore, then she won’t bring the investments back. Once those investments go off-shore they’ll be long-term and will take 25 to 50 years to unwind, and she’s already doing what many other investors have already done. All this drama.
Australian deals now get done in New York and/or Singapore because, with the exception of Macquarie Bank, none of the investment banking operations in Australia have retained the operational capabilities to do big deals anymore.
In the USA, the billionaires are queueing up to take their turns to create drama on the political stage from their shadow of vanity in front of a global audience like it’s some kind of reality TV shit show.
The terrible impacts of oppression, genocide, warfare, and economic stupidity inside the USA’s own borders is relegated to being a sideshow.
White supremacy in USA law enforcement is a documented fact of oppression. Providing food and water that is poisonous to different populations in the USA because it is profitable, is an act of genocide against its own citizens. Active shooter drills being practiced in USA schools to minimise deaths from automatic weapons fire from mostly-white terrorists indicates that the USA is at war with itself. Drilling for more oil that the USA has no on-shore capability to actually refine is economic stupidity.
My kids are sick of all this drama.
They’re not apathetic, but they are massively disengaged. One of their cousins overseas has started referring to the USA as ‘dumbfuckistan’ because to them it feels good to fight drama by causing more drama. The one thing they really do feel is powerless - and trading insults and trolling on social media is the only thing they feel like they have left.
For my kids, seeing all these billionaires at a recent public event looking like a “conga line of suck-holes” (to quote Mark Latham) just compounds the feeling of powerlessness.
One of these billionaires was twitching and rolling their eyes like a heroin addict running late for their next dose of methadone.
If you’ve ever travelled regularly on the Frankston train line in Melbourne Australia, then you’ll recognise this kind of twitching and eye rolling behaviour by heroin addicts heading for the pharmacy where they get their methadone treatment.
Methadone is a medical treatment that stops their cravings for heroin, but doesn’t get them high. If they’ve left it too late to get there before the cravings really kick in hard, then what comes next is these junkies start banging their heads against the train doors and screaming.
Given what transpired later that day with that same billionaire, it could be observed that perhaps a similar situation was going on.
This demand for the death of drama is not just coming from my children - their entire generation feels disenfranchised by the billionaire class and their Boomer and GenX sycophants.
Their bullshit propaganda machines are driven by algorithms to deliver drama and distract us from the real issues of poverty, economic inequity, violence against women, racism, oppression, and selling weapons that enable genocide instead of defence.
This desire for the death of drama represents a massive shift in humanity - these new generations are fully attuned to recognise unwanted drama, and they’re building their immunity to the media algorithms that are designed to distract and deter the Boomers and GenX from asking the hard questions.
That’s not to say that our children don’t try to disassociate, it’s just that drugs and alcohol that dumb down the boomers and GenX are no longer the vices that they once were.
Gaming and cosplay are the new powerful expression of finding other worlds where the younger generations feel safe from the bullshit that they detest.
Populations in developed countries around the world are rapidly aging, and no one lives forever - so my focus on the death of drama, the shadow of vanity, and the poetry of death is here to set out a call to action - a new mission for us to create a legacy that empowers these next generations!
This legacy I’m calling for is for us to lead by example in showing our future generations the way to engage with our shadows of vanity and kill the drama within us so that our children can see and understand how to clear the way for their own futures and be free of their shadows of vanity.
My vision is to permanently disable the propaganda algorithms that have so successfully held boomers and GenX in their thrall, by engaging with our shadow of vanity and killing the drama.
The death of drama will remove the power of thought control via the media that the boomer & GenX billionaires are so deeply invested in that it allows them to justify the oppression, the genocide, and the warfare.
World peace is delivered by making the death of drama our personal vision.