The Middle Classes thrive on achievement and success. Focus on education and attainment in early family life creates an environment where the achievement comes first and the achiever/person comes a long second. Start a new project and a bevy of middle class types want to write it up and publish a paper.

Driven by a false and arbitrary set of standards the middle classes hoover up opportunities to prove themselves, and create a success of themselves that their families have set them. Parents compensating for their own failures or wanting to maintain a standard of living push their kids along to achieve greater measurable success.

The middle classes are being squeezed between the super rich and the working class, and under class below. The middle classes are no longer so secure in employment and retirement. There is less to go round increasing the determination and will to succeed and progress.

Of course this at the same time is laudable. This is progress. Innovation, research and writing to publish, pushes civilization forward to improve and understand itself and what it is going through. Advances in technology and medicine create a better world for us all to live in? But there again does it?

There seems to be little acknowledgement that fear and insecurity motivate the Middle Classes to do what they do. It is not the project that is important but the way it heightens the perception from the outside world that the person is successful because of their successful project. They are secure. No project no security.

Can we imagine a world where progress was planned and thought out rather than guided by insecurity and fear? There seems to be no place for progress without drive or mania.  Everyone is out to prove themselves driven on by their family’s expectations.

To live in a world where we are happy in the value of ourselves would revolutionise progress. There were would be less need for external validation. For the moment this world seems unimaginable.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2015
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