What images shape your hopes and dreams about a well-lived life?

What images surround you?

Every culture creates aspirational images, images that tell stories about what kinds of people it wants its members to become.

What kind of person should you be? The culture we live in, like every other culture, has Ideas about this.

Widely Distributed Images Are Meant to Shape You

It’s good to be aware of which heavily distributed images surround you, and why they are so common. Commonly produced images influence your thinking about yourself and where you will put your energies.

What images are displayed in your home? In the media you consume? In the community around you?

How might those publicly endorsed and widely produced images be shaping your imagination?

Here are examples of what I mean by widely distributed aspirational imagery:

• early modern era allegorical paintings and prints with images of concepts like the Virtues, or Hogarth’s widely distributed Beer Street and Gin Lane.

• statues and pictures of leaders of totalitarian societies, such as statues of Lenin and Stalin placed in public squares, and pictures of Lenin and Stalin in people’s homes (…versus statues torn down* and moved to memorial parks and museums)

• mass-produced religious prints, icons, saint cards

Images can be life-giving, or toxic. Images can spark cultural revival, or genocide. Images are powerfully influential. They reach us on a deep level, below words. Beware, and be aware of them. Make yourself aware of what images are streaming around you, feeding your imagination.

Religious traditions are intensely aware of the immense power that images have to shape us. In the history of Christianity alone, which is the tradition I’m most familiar with, some movements produce images and other movements set out to destroy them.

Marketing Perfection: Our Photos and Ratings Culture

The aspirational images most commonly promoted and distributed in our culture come from advertising. I think of these images as staged and static.

They capture a “perfect” moment.

These aspirational images are working to sell you the hope of a well-lived life. If you purchase this, everything else will come together for you. If you take this online course, you will be able to start a successful business. If you own that kind of patio furniture, family and friends will gather there and everyone will finally be getting along. And so on.

No one says that outright of course, like I just did above. We can’t be fooled by that, stated so baldly.

But the images work below the level of our words. Our personal hopes then fill in the blanks. Much harder to catch their message that way.

The Perfectionist Treadmill of Static and Staged Photos

Let’s take the example of the static and staged marketing images of young mothers, because I know from experience that it is utter b.s.

Consider a common image of the Glowing Young Mother: Everyone and everything is clean. The room is clean. The scenery outside the open window is clean. The baby is clean, for the moment. The model pretending to be the baby’s mother is clean, for the moment. The model is wearing something flowing and white. (And clean.) Her hair is perfectly done, as is her make-up. And did I mention how everything is clean?

When I had an infant (and not too long after, a toddler and another infant), it astonished me how difficult it was to find time to get a shower. And cleaning is Sisyphean when you have young children. My favorite thing to wear was an unromantic but very forgiving knit shirt with a black background with a small, busy floral pattern on it. This was a fabulous shirt because even though it got splattered hourly with multiple body fluids (yes, I had a burp cloth; no, they don’t catch nearly enough), my big, busy-patterned, dark shirt never looked stained. This is because it wasn’t white. I’ve actually never seen mothers and infants in the wild who looked like the ones in the static and staged photos.

Women generally get images of the Glowing Young Mother, or the Perfect House and Garden, or Perfect Body and Perfect Style, whatever the current trend is. (I favor a custom blend of Coastal Grandmother — well, okay, the oversized shirts — and Hiking Bird Nerd, if you were wondering.) I guess women are to aspire to keep everything looking spotless and on trend: themselves, their children, their surroundings… and to be human wallets.

Men get images of gear — the right gear, this year’s gear, not old gear, unless it is pre$tigious vintage gear — fitness gear, camera gear, outdoor gear, computer gear — and all of it expensive gear, meaning, I suppose, that men are to aspire to be experts at things requiring lots of tools with lots of adjustable, precision settings… and to be human wallets.

It’s interesting to me that these mass-marketed aspirational images are also so rigid when it comes to gender roles. (You rarely see women posed with gear; although we use tools and cameras too. And how often do you see a static, staged photo of a Glowing Young Father, with a razor-edge groomed beard, and his hair looks fabulous; and he is dressed in flowing white, and he is blissfully nuzzling an infant as they pose in the soft golden sunlight filtered through billowing gauze curtains?)

The Perfectionist Treadmill of Ratings, Reviews, and Benchmarks

We also are surrounded by a ratings culture: 5 star ratings, metrics, reviews, benchmarks, and KPIs abounding.

“When you get this one thing, when you hit this one number (this much money, this kind of house, this level of fitness, this many followers, this job title…), everything else will fall into place. You will have arrived. You will be a success — and therefore, happy.”

This is the unspoken message that bombards us from our culture, pumping out its static and staged aspirational images and its 5-star ratings and “benchmark” metrics (whose benchmark…?) which all converge in order to persuade people that if you only liberate money from your wallet to have THIS — buy this app subscription, buy this webcam, buy this jacket — you will hit the right metrics and at last be able to live well.

At last, your life will come together. At last, you will be a success: if your life looks like that picture, if you could only hit those numbers. And again, if we saw this in words we could more easily see through it. But pictures and numbers do their work below the level of words.

The aspirational imagery that saturates our culture is about extracting money from you to the market. This is literally sold to us as the good life: to present a good looking appearance, surrounded by good looking things.

But generating meaning or a sense of purpose cannot be bought. Literally, there is not a thing you can purchase that can give you that. And a fulfilling life cannot be summed up with a photo.

The “perfection” that our culture is selling through images and metrics is an illusion.

You cannot buy your way to a well-lived life. The things that make for a well-lived life are not reduceable to ratings or measurements.

Building A Fulfilling Life is About Slow Growth into Your Potentials

All right, bear with me, this is still not a religious blog, but I want to share with you a moment from seminary Greek class, when a translation from a biblical text profoundly changed the way I thought about what it means to live well.

We’re taking a look at a Greek word in Matthew 5:48. This verse is commonly translated as: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

It creates gross misunderstanding to translate this word as “perfect,” when our culture hears that as being without error; never making mistakes; or even as a demand to reach a pinnacle of achievement; a Nadia Comaneci Olympic gold perfect 10.

The word that often gets translated into “perfect” in English, is the Greek word τέλειός (teleios).

The better translation is “complete,” in the sense of potentials being fulfilled. (Aristotle fans, this word is closely related to the word “telos” — the actualization of potential.)

Be complete.

The ancient writer of this ancient text wanted to get across the idea of fulfillment in the sense of fulfilling innate potential; specifically, our potential for expressing love. (For more on the religious context around this verse, see note** below.)

This is NOT about being perfect, as our culture hears that word. We are not aiming to contort ourselves to imitate static, staged images, or to hit artificial metrics.

Let’s ditch the word perfect, and instead consider the word “complete.”

Living a fulfilling life is a life that moves you toward being complete in that Aristotelian sense: you keep growing into your potentials.

You become complete by growing into your own gifts, interconnected with the world around you, in relationship with the world around you.

This interconnectedness is important, too. Static, staged photos show people in isolation. Artificial metrics measure only one thing.

But becoming complete is a living process that happens in a living context, a particular, dynamic, and yes, living, environment.

Become Complete Like a Tree Becomes Complete

The image that works best for me is to think of a beautiful old tree. How might we think of that tree as being “complete”?

Picture a seedling that over time fulfills its potential to become a great tree, with spreading branches.

Over the years it grows slowly but steadily to offer shade and shelter to the more-than-human world.

It grows to provide sustenance to other trees.

To human souls and perhaps the souls in other living things, its being provides beauty.

And it is generative: it produces seedlings of its own, the potential for great trees for the future.

With the image of the slow growth from a seedling into a beautiful old tree, your fulfilling life, your well-lived life, emerges as you grow more fully into your potentials.

When you grow into your potential for love, your potential for creativity, your potential for connecting with others, your potential for being a mentor, your potential for contributing to the wider world, you grow more and more toward being complete.

More and more, you express, you bring into the larger world, the potential that is in you.

You can continue to grow in love, and in creativity, and in connection, until the day you die. I’ve known people in their very last days who were still growing.

And — like we cannot push an acorn to turn into a full-grown oak in a year or two — growth is a process that follows its own timeline, not yours. It unfolds over time, and unfolds in dialogue.

Your potentials are inherent in you, but you cannot fulfill them in isolation; any more than an oak tree can grow without soil or water or sunlight.

Your growth is inseparable from the environment and the communities in which you grow. You affect the world around you, and it affects you. Interconnected!

Growing into your potentials cannot be captured with photos or metrics, although a series of them can tell some of the story of growth, like we might take a pencil and mark the growth of a child on a door frame over the years.

We grow our roots deeper… we grow more stable… we reach out our branches to capture more light… we grow into our generativity, we grow into companionship, we grow into providing psychological and perhaps physical shelter for those who are younger or who need extra care… and we do this with small consistent actions, over a long, long time.

For me, thinking of growing complete like a beautiful mature tree is complete, gave me a life-giving image of what it means to live a fulfilled life: a well-lived life that is the opposite of our perfectionist, insatiable, impatient, image-and-metrics obsessed, hamster-wheel culture.

I hope this is a life-giving image for you as well.

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References

Art: Calvinist Iconoclasm (no date) Annenberg Learner. Available at: https://www.learner.org/series/art-through-time-a-global-view/conflict-and-resistance/calvinist-iconoclasm/ (Accessed: 26 May 2022).

Hogarth, Beer Street and Gin Lane - https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20150610-london-city-of-sin (Accessed: 19 May 2022).

‘Grūtas Park’ (2022) Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gr%C5%ABtas_Park&oldid=1080353192 (Accessed: 19 May 2022).

Grant, R. (no date) Do Trees Talk to Each Other?, Smithsonian Magazine. Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering-trees-180968084/ (Accessed: 5 April 2022).

Notes

*Right now where I live in the Southern U.S., lawsuits are flying back and forth about what to do with all those Confederate statues and monuments.

**This passage is part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, furthering the discourse about loving your enemies. In the case of this verse, the writer is getting at the idea that people are to fully express, to fully potentiate, divine — specifically, divinely impartial! — love. Listeners are urged to love impartially and indiscriminately like God loves. Anyone can love someone who loves them; the challenge is to love the enemy. The writer compares divine love to the natural world: The sun shines and the rain falls on all people, regardless of whether they are “good or evil.” See this walk-through of Matthew 5:38-48 if you want to dive deeper into the context and into the Greek here.