When Tourism Becomes 'Good News Only'

With few exceptions, travel writing and travel sections share the singular goal of helping consumers spend their money pursuing the dream of a perfect trip. They seldom write critical reviews; only articles about what to do and what to buy and how to experience a destination. This “feel-good” approach is rare even in lifestyle journalism, which is where to find the travel sections.
 
Modern travel writing took root in the late nineteenth century—the age of ocean liners and trains—when writers took it for granted that travel meant adventure, not comfort, and that anyone making a month-long trip overseas wanted to dive into foreign lands and cultures. In those days writers rarely specialized in travel alone. They saw themselves as the gatekeepers to the world, noting all that was miserable as well as glorious about foreign cultures. Their touchstone was Marco Polo, the grandfather of all travel writing.
 

New Heart of Travel?

An elegant woman who had been the editor of the newspaper’s influential Style section, Newhouse was a veteran of the “lifestyle” genre of reporting. With so many more nations to cover and technological changes in the travel industry, she refined her writers’ mission to concentrate on describing the experience of traveling to a certain destination and to write consumer stories to help tourists make the most of those trips.
 
These new consumer pieces were shorter and reported on lower fares and bargain flights, and they were decidedly subjective, emphasizing the personal point of view. “If you lose the vision of an individual, how they interpret a country, you’ve lost the heart of travel,” Newhouse said. Travel writing was becoming reporting an “experience” where the reporter didn’t need to know that much about Burma as show a talent for telling a good story about the experience of visiting Burma and well-researched recommendations for where to spend the night. This produced the major emphasis on “good news only” consumer travel writing. Travel sections told the reader where to go and what to do, but not what to avoid.
 
The rise of the Internet confirmed this direction. With its websites rating hotels, airlines, restaurants, and tours, travel writing became singularly focused on practical consumer information.
 
Travel writing and its refusal to treat the industry seriously can take some of the blame for tourism’s frivolous reputation.
 

- Elizabeth Becker, Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism, 2013.

When Tourism Becomes an Industry

But just as tourism is capable of lifting a nation out of poverty, it is just as likely to pollute the environment, reduce standards of living for the poor because the profits go to international hotel chains and corrupt local elites (what is called leakage), and cater to the worst of tourism, including condemning children to the exploitation of sex tourism. Like any major industry, tourism has a serious downside, especially since tourism and travel is underestimated as a global powerhouse; its study and regulation is spotty at best.
 
Tourism is one of those double-edged swords that may look like an easy way to earn desperately needed money but can ravage wilderness areas and undermine native cultures to fit into package tours… What is known is that tourism and travel is responsible for 5.3 percent of the world’s carbon emissions and the degradation of nearly every tropical beach in the world. Without global enforcement of basic rules, cruise ships are a major polluter of the seas and pose serious risks…
 
A Threat to native habitats and cultures
 
To make way for more resorts with spectacular views, developers destroy native habitats and ignore local concerns. Preservationists decry the growing propensity to bulldoze old hotels and buildings in favor of constructing new resorts, water holes and entertainment spots that look identical whether in Singapore, Dubai or Johannesburg; a world where diversity is replaced with homogeneity. Another catastrophe for countries betting on tourism has come from wealthy vacationers who fall in love with a country and buy so many second houses that locals can no longer afford to live in their own towns and villages.
 
Among the more thoughtful questions is how mass tourism has changed cultures. African children told anthropologists that they want to grow up to be tourists so they could spend the day doing nothing but eating. The tourists who do not speak the local language and rely on guides to tell them what they are seeing and what to think marvel at countries like China with its new wealth and appearance of democracy. Environmentalists wonder how long the globe can continue to support 1 billion people racing around the world for a long weekend on a beach or a ten-day tour of an African game park.
 
“low volume and high value” tourism
 
In reaction, concerned industry leaders—large and small—and environmentalists have created the idea of ecotourism, a form of travel to promote the protection of natural habitats and eventually the preservation of local landscapes, cultures and people. The idea has become so popular it has entered the lexicon of political correctness. Philanthropists are underwriting ecolodges in Central America and wild game parks in sub-Saharan Africa. Tourists opt for vacations on organic European farms, while some add volunteer days at the end of their vacations in Asia to build homes for the poor. Few nations have shown more caution about the tourism industry and its downside than Bhutan. The Himalayan nation that measures progress through its happiness index has purposefully kept the number of tourists low to insure that the country’s culture, environment, faith and economy aren’t perverted by huge influxes of foreign tourists. The government says it limits tourists by regulating how many hotel rooms are available and limiting other tourist “infrastructure” as well as imposing a high tourist tariff. Bhutan calls this “low volume and high value” tourism.
 
At the opposite end of the spectrum are countries like Cambodia and cities like Venice. Cambodia encourages so many tourists to visit its great eleventh-century temple complex at Angkor that the rare temples are sinking because the surrounding water table is being drained by hundreds of new tourist hotels. In Venice, with a native population of less than 60,000, over 20 million tourists descend on the city every year, an onslaught that is pushing the locals out of their homes and emptying the city of essentials like neighborhood greengrocers and bakeries. 

- Elizabeth Becker, Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism, 2013.

The Stages of Sleep

Sleep begins with NREM sleep, progressing through the three basic NREM sleep stages, sleep stages 1 and 2 and slow wave sleep. NREM sleep is then followed by a relatively short REM sleep episode. The time between falling asleep and the end of the REM episode constitutes a sleep cycle.

NREM Sleep

Stage 1
Sleep is very light sleep and it occurs during transitions from awake to asleep. Your muscle tone begins to decrease during this stage but slow eye movement continues. Most people don’t even notice that they’re sleeping at this point.

Stage 2 
During this stage of sleep, eye movements stop, and brain waves slow—with intermittent rapid wave bursts called “sleep spindles”. Most people when woken-up from stage 2 sleep realize that they were sleeping. If you’ve ever woken someone up during this stage, you probably noticed that the person slowly opened their eyes, looked around confusedly, and then went back to sleep.

Stages 3 and 4 (slow-wave sleep) 
In these stages brain waves slow further to a pattern called “delta waves” mixed with occasional spurts of faster waves. Heart rate and body temperature continue to drop, along with blood pressure and muscle tone. Eye movements remain absent. This is the deepest most restorative stage of sleep. If your alarm clock goes off during slow-wave sleep, you may feel confused and groggy for several minutes after waking up.

REM Sleep

This is when you do most of your dreaming, and is a time when your brain is actively encoding lessons that you learned and memories that you made throughout the day. Some people have called this type of sleep “paradoxical sleep” because it involves relatively fast brain activity and irregular heart rate and blood pressure, as well as characteristic rapid eye movements. During REM sleep your limbs are temporarily paralyzed, perhaps to keep your body from acting out action packed dreams.

Your sleep progresses through these cycles of NREM and REM sleep about every 90 minutes. Your brain engages in most slow wave sleep earlier in the night, which will ensure you get enough of this most restorative sleep state even if you cut your night short by an early morning meeting. If this happens to be the case, just remember that you can always catch up on sleep with a short nap during the day!

- StanfordOnline SOM, Staying Fit

Cognitive Distortions

Cognitive behavioral therapy was developed in the 1960s by Aaron Beck, a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania. At the time, Freudian ideas dominated psychiatry. Clinicians assumed that depression and the distorted thinking it produces were just the surface manifestation of deeper problems, usually stretching back to unresolved childhood conflict. To treat depression, you had to fix the underlying problem, and that could take many years of therapy. But Beck saw a close connection between the thoughts a person had and the feelings that came with them. He noticed that his patients tended to get themselves caught in a feedback loop in which irrational negative beliefs caused powerful negative feelings, which in turn seemed to drive patients’ reasoning, motivating them to find evidence to support their negative beliefs. Beck noticed a common pattern of beliefs, which he called the “cognitive triad” of depression: “I’m no good,” “My world is bleak,” and “My future is hopeless.”
 
Many people experience one or two of these thoughts fleetingly, but depressed people tend to hold all three beliefs in a stable and enduring psychological structure. Psychologists call such structures schemas. Schemas refer to the patterns of thoughts and behaviors, built up over time, that people use to process information quickly and effortlessly as they interact with the world. Schemas are deep down in the elephant; they are one of the ways in which the elephant guides the rider. Depressed people have schemas about themselves and their paths through life that are thoroughly disempowering.
 
Beck’s great discovery was that it is possible to break the disempowering feedback cycle between negative beliefs and negative emotions. If you can get people to examine these beliefs and consider counterevidence, it gives them at least some moments of relief from negative emotions, and if you release them from negative emotions, they become more open to questioning their negative beliefs. It takes some skill to do this—depressed people are very good at finding evidence for the beliefs in the triad. And it takes time.
 
But it is possible to train people to learn Beck’s method so they can question their automatic thoughts on their own, every day. With repetition, over a period of weeks or months, people can change their schemas and create different, more helpful habitual beliefs (such as “I can handle most challenges” or “I have friends I can trust”). With CBT, there is no need to spend years talking about one’s childhood.
 
The list below shows nine of the most common cognitive distortions that people learn to recognize in CBT [based on a longer list in Robert Leahy, Stephen Holland, and Lata McGinn’s book, Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders]
 

EMOTIONAL REASONING: Letting your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.”
 
CATASTROPHIZING: Focusing on the worst possible outcome and seeing it as most likely. “It would be terrible if I failed.”
 
OVERGENERALIZING: Perceiving a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.”
 
DICHOTOMOUS THINKING (also known variously as “black-and-white thinking,” “all-or-nothing thinking,” and “binary thinking”): Viewing events or people in all-or-nothing terms. “I get rejected by everyone,” or “It was a complete waste of time.”
 
MIND READING: Assuming that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. “He thinks I’m a loser.”
 
LABELING: Assigning global negative traits to yourself or others (often in the service of dichotomous thinking). “I’m undesirable,” or “He’s a rotten person.”
 
NEGATIVE FILTERING: You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.”
 
DISCOUNTING POSITIVES: Claiming that the positive things you or others do are trivial, so that you can maintain a negative judgment. “That’s what wives are supposed to do—so it doesn’t count when she’s nice to me,” or “Those successes were easy, so they don’t matter.”
 
BLAMING: Focusing on the other person as the source of your negative feelings; you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. “She’s to blame for the way I feel now,” or “My parents caused all my problems.

- Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: 

How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation, 2018

The Definition of 'Trauma'

In the early versions of the primary manual of psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychiatrists used the word “trauma” only to describe a physical agent causing physical damage, as in the case of what we now call traumatic brain injury.
 
In the 1980 revision, however, the manual (DSM III) recognized “post-traumatic stress disorder” as a mental disorder—the first type of traumatic injury that isn’t physical. PTSD is caused by an extraordinary and terrifying experience, and the criteria for a traumatic event that warrants a diagnosis of PTSD were (and are) strict: to qualify, an event would have to “evoke significant symptoms of distress in almost everyone” and be “outside the range of usual human experience.” The DSM III emphasized that the event was not based on a subjective standard. It had to be something that would cause most people to have a severe reaction. War, rape, and torture were included in this category. Divorce and simple bereavement (as in the death of a spouse due to natural causes), on the other hand, were not, because they are normal parts of life, even if unexpected. These experiences are sad and painful, but pain is not the same thing as trauma. People in these situations that don’t fall into the “trauma” category might benefit from counseling, but they generally recover from such losses without any therapeutic interventions. In fact, even most people who do have traumatic experiences recover completely without intervention.
 
By the early 2000s, however, the concept of “trauma” within parts of the therapeutic community had crept down so far that it included anything “experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful . . . with lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.” The subjective experience of “harm” became definitional in assessing trauma. As a result, the word “trauma” became much more widely used, not just by mental health professionals but by their clients and patients—including an increasing number of college students.
 
As with trauma, a key change for most of the concepts was the shift to a subjective standard. It was not for anyone else to decide what counted as trauma, bullying, or abuse; if it felt like that to you, trust your feelings. If a person reported that an event was traumatic (or bullying or abusive), his or her subjective assessment was increasingly taken as sufficient evidence. And if a rapidly growing number of students have been diagnosed with a mental disorder, then there is a rapidly growing need for the campus community to protect them. 

Concepts sometimes creep. Concepts like trauma and safety have expanded so far since the 1980s that they are often employed in ways that are no longer grounded in legitimate psychological research. Grossly expanded conceptions of trauma and safety are now used to justify the overprotection of children of all ages—even college students, who are sometimes said to need safe spaces and trigger warnings lest words and ideas put them in danger.

- Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: 

How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation, 2018

The Needs for Connection - Belonging & Intimacy

 The need for connection—to form and maintain at least a minimal number of positive, stable, intimate relationships—is a fundamental need that affects our whole being, permeating our entire suite of emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. While individuals differ in the strength of this need, connection is an irreducible, undeniable human need. The need for connection actually consists of two subneeds: (a) The need to belong, to be liked, to be accepted, and (b) The need for intimacy, for mutuality, for relatedness.
 
The Need for Belonging
 
As with all the other needs, the critical metric is the distance between your need for belonging and just how unmet this need is in your daily life. Research shows that those who report the highest levels of loneliness are those who have the highest unmet need to belong. The greater the discrepancy between a person’s need to belong and their satisfaction with their personal relationships, the higher the levels of loneliness and the lower the levels of life satisfaction in their daily lives.
 
This finding applies both to those who are living alone as well as those who are living with others. Simply living with someone does not guarantee that connection needs are being met. It’s the quality of the connections that matter for predicting loneliness, not the quantity of connections or even the proximity of the connections. Let’s take a closer look at this other essential component of connection.
 
The Need for Intimacy
 
While a secure attachment style serves as a critical foundation for connection, it does not assure intimacy. The essence of intimacy is a high-quality connection. What is a high-quality connection? Jane Dutton and Emily Heaphy define a high-quality connection as a “dynamic, living tissue that exists between two people when there is some contact between them involving mutual awareness and social interaction.”A high-quality connection makes both people feel especially vital and alive. A low-quality connection, on the other hand, can be downright depleting. As one business manager put it, “Corrosive connections are like black holes: they absorb all of the light in the system and give back nothing in return.”
 

- Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, 2020

The Need for Attachment Security

The four adult categories of attachment style—secure, fearful, preoccupied, and dismissing—can be represented as a combination of just two dimensions: anxious and avoidant. The anxious-attachment dimension reflects a concern about being rejected and abandoned and is the product of beliefs about whether others will be there for you in times of need. The avoidant-attachment dimension has less to do with a sense of safety and more to do with how you regulate your emotions in response to stress—whether you use others as a secure base or pull away and withdraw from them.
 
Studies show that these two dimensions are only weakly correlated with each other, which creates the possibility that people can score high on both dimensions. A further implication is that “secure attachment” doesn’t exist as a separate category; secure attachment is just the combination of low anxiety and low avoidance. Modern research suggests that there is no such thing as a completely securely attached person; all of us are at least a little bit anxious and avoidant when stress rears its head in our relationships.
 
Nevertheless, your particular placement on the anxious- and avoidant-attachment dimensions has important implications. Those who score lower on these dimensions tend to report more constructive ways of coping and regulating their emotions, thoughts, and behavior, and they report higher levels of relationship satisfaction, psychological adjustment, healthy self-esteem, and even heightened altruism, volunteerism, empathy, and increased tolerance of people who are in a different social group than those who are more insecurely attached. It’s clear that secure attachment doesn’t just set the stage for more satisfying relationships; it also sets the stage for many other aspects of growth.

- Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, 2020

Healthy Self-esteem

All people in our society (with a few pathological exceptions) have a need or desire for a stable, firmly based, (usually) high evaluation of themselves, for self-respect, or self-esteem, and for the esteem of others. —Abraham Maslow, A Theory of Human Motivation (1943)
 
Maslow and other humanistic psychologists, such as Carl Rogers, have been blamed for inspiring the self-esteem movement in the United States, which reached its apotheosis in the 1980s and 1990s, with a focus on feeling good about oneself as the answer to all of life’s problems. But a close reading of the psychological literature suggests that the problem isn’t with self-esteem but the pursuit of self-esteem.
 
So what is a healthy self-esteem? Modern research has identified two distinct faces of healthy self-esteem: self-worth and mastery.
 
Self-worth
 
Maslow sometimes distinguished between the need for self-esteem and the need for esteem from others. However, modern research shows that the evaluation of others is often linked to our self-esteem. Like it or not, we are a social animal, and the judgments we formulate of our self frequently incorporate the judgment of others. Social psychologist Mark Leary’s research has shown that our feelings of self-worth strongly track our social value, or at least our perceptions of our social value. (Sometimes our perceptions are inaccurate.)
 
Leary and his colleagues Katrina Jongman-Sereno and Kate Diebels distinguish two forms of social value we can have in this world: relational social value (the degree to which we regard our relationship with others as personally valuable and important) and instrumental social value (the degree to which others perceive us as possessing resources and/or personal characteristics that are important for the benefit of the collective good). Those with a high sense of self-worth tend to like themselves, and view themselves as having high relational value.
 
Mastery
 
Your entire life history of successes and failures influence the attitude you have toward yourself as an intentional being capable of reaching your goals in life. The more successful you are at making progress toward your goals, the more confident you feel, and the two tend to spiral upward toward a stable sense of mastery. Vice versa, the more your goals are thwarted in life, the more you tend to spiral downward toward insecurity and feelings of incompetence. Since we are such a social species, mastery also tends to be linked to social value, but mastery tends to track instrumental social value more than relational social value. Those with high mastery tend to have traits that confer greater social status in their society due to their usefulness to others—not necessarily the characteristics that are valued in a friend, family member, or social group.
 
While both a healthy sense of self-worth and mastery are strongly related to each other—people tend to develop both forms of self-esteem in tandem—the two can come apart. It’s possible to view yourself as a willful agent in the world, capable of accomplishing your goals, but not really like or respect yourself. And vice versa, it’s possible to like yourself while not feeling very effective in reaching your goals. Tafarodi refers to these situations as “paradoxical self-esteem” and has shown that such variations have implications for how we process and remember social feedback from others.
 
This is why feelings of self-worth are so strongly linked to the need for belonging.
 

- Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, 2020

The Two Faces of Narcissism (3) - Grandiose Narcissism

In fact, we found that grandiose narcissism is related to reports of greater life satisfaction. But we found that this increased life satisfaction is likely to come with a cost—disconnection from one’s own self. We found that those scoring high in grandiose narcissism reported high levels of imposter syndrome, a weak sense of self, self-alienation, a greater likelihood of accepting external influence, and higher levels of experiential avoidance.
 
Both forms of narcissism involve defense of a particular self-image. Vulnerable narcissists mount a vehement defense against being rejected and appearing unworthy of love and belonging. Grandiose narcissists fiercely defend a superior self-image. Both strategies can sometimes be helpful in achieving self-enhancing goals, but both incur the cost of others and a cost to one’s capacity to connect deeply with one’s most valued goals and desires.
 
We found that grandiose narcissism is also related to a black-and-white view of others, seen in the endorsement of statements such as “As far as I’m concerned, people are either good or bad,” as well as an extreme view of themselves, seeing themselves as fearless and bold.
 
One meta-analysis found that those scoring high in grandiose narcissism are more likely to impose harshly perfectionistic demands on others, showing perpetual dissatisfaction with their perceived flaws.
 
Collective Narcissism: Defensive Form of In-group Positivity
 
In recent years, psychologists have been scientifically investigating “collective narcissism,” a defensive form of in-group positivity. People who score high on tests of collective narcissism believe that their in-group deserves special treatment and insist that their in-group gets the recognition it deserves. Just like individual narcissism, collective narcissism stems from the frustration that comes from the need for control and self-esteem and is an attempt to compensate for such insecurity.
 
In contrast, self-esteem has been linked to healthy in-group positivity, which is more likely to foster both in-group and out-group love. This is ultimately an uplifting message: just as it’s possible to have a heathy self-esteem, it’s possible to have healthy in-group love—where it feels good to be a member of your in-group and in which you have great pride for the genuine accomplishments of your group without constantly experiencing hypersensitivity to intergroup threat and hostility.
 
Addicted to Self-esteem
 
At the end of the day, I believe we shouldn’t ignore the seduction of power or pretend that this pull is not a part of our common humanity. But striving for power does not necessarily have to lead to destruction. Almost all humans strive for mastery and to make a difference in the world, but as Adler noted, we also have a striving for social interest. We have both strivings within us. Therefore, the question remains: How can we satisfy our self-esteem needs in the most authentic, healthy, and growth-fostering way?
 

- Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, 2020

The Two Faces of Narcissism (2) - Vulnerable Narcissism

The research on vulnerable narcissism suggests that high levels of uncertainty about one’s worth as a human being often bring along with it hairpin triggers of shame and reactive hostility, avoidance of situations that may activate such triggers, grandiose fantasies of receiving validation and respect from others, a constant need for validation and attention from others (including feeling entitled to the attention of others and constant resentment for not being appreciated), a hiding of one’s felt needs and perceived weaknesses, an excessive need to help others in order to feel good about oneself, and distrust and cynicism about people’s true intentions.
 
While features of vulnerable narcissism may help in managing the overwhelmingly painful feelings of low self-worth and shame generated by rejection and early childhood abuse and can help minimize the chances that the abuse will ever happen again, vulnerable narcissism is linked to a host of beliefs, coping strategies, and attachment styles that ultimately inhibit health, growth, and integration. In our research, we found that vulnerable narcissism was associated with lower levels of life satisfaction, autonomy, authenticity, mastery, personal growth, positive social relationships, purpose, and self-acceptance in life, as well as a lack of trust in one’s thoughts and feelings, and a profound lack of a sense of self.
 
We also found an extremely strong relationship between vulnerable narcissism and reports of imposter syndrome. Those scoring high in vulnerable narcissism scored high on statements such as “I tend to feel like a phony,” and “Sometimes I am afraid I will be discovered for who I really am.” It’s less likely that such individuals actually feel fraudulent and more likely that they engage a “self-presentation strategy” that serves as another way of protecting themselves against the potential pain of rejection. By adjusting the expectations of others, they won’t feel as intensely ashamed if they do fail.
 
We also found that those scoring high in vulnerable narcissism have great difficulty reining in their strong impulses and taking constructive action on their own behalf. The defense mechanisms they tend to employ—harboring infantile and unrealistic fantasies, projecting responsibility onto others, being passive-aggressive in expressing their needs, apologizing for asserting their needs, experiencing somatic symptoms, isolating themselves from those who could offer support, suppressing emotions, reacting with anger when hurt or stressed, and engaging in impulsive behaviors such as eating to feel better and regain control—make sense for a vulnerable child trying to cope with intense pain and fear. But in adulthood, they prevent growth of the whole person.
 
From Vulnerability to Growth
 
Vulnerable narcissism need not be a barrier to growth. Any of us, regardless of our levels of these characteristics, can take charge of our lives and start to build a coherent and stable sense of self. A key way of overcoming severe self-esteem uncertainty is to shed the perfectionistic self-presentation. As one meta-analysis of the literature found, vulnerable narcissism is significantly linked to an obsessive concern over whether one is coming across as imperfect to others, as well as perceiving others as demanding perfection of oneself.
 
Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) can be immensely helpful in learning to regulate the intense feelings of rejection and shame we often feel and the irrational, negative thoughts that are floating around constantly in our heads. You really can “retrain your brain.” Steven Hayes, founder of the ACT approach to psychotherapy, has stated that an important outcome of ACT is “the ability to contact the present moment more fully as a conscious human being, and to change or persist in behavior when doing so serves valued ends.
 
Changing your self-limiting narratives about your worthiness, asserting needs in a healthy way, overcoming your avoidance of fearful experiences, and taking responsibility for your behaviors—these actions strengthen and stabilize the vulnerable self. The great irony is that the less you focus on whether you are worthy and competent, and take that as a given, the greater the chances you will consistently accept your inherent worth.
 

- Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, 2020

The Two Faces of Narcissism (1) - Self-esteem vs. Narcissism

Too often, psychologists and people in the media conflate a healthy self-esteem with narcissism. Contrary to many people’s perceptions, narcissism and self-esteem have very different developmental pathways and outcomes in life. Those with a high self-esteem believe they are worthy and competent and strive for intimate, meaningful connections with others, but they don’t necessarily view themselves as superior to others.
 
The development of self-esteem and narcissism are also influenced by different parenting styles. Narcissism tends to develop in tandem with parental overevaluation: parents who raise children who exhibit high levels of narcissism tend to overclaim their child’s knowledge, overestimate their child’s IQ, overpraise their child’s performance, and even tend to give their child a unique name to stand out from the crowd. In contrast, high self-esteem develops in tandem with parental warmth. Parents who raise children who exhibit high levels of self-esteem tend to treat their children with affection and appreciation. They treat their children as though they matter.
 
Modern researchers have identified two unhealthy attempts at regulating the need for self-esteem: grandiose narcissism and vulnerable narcissism. When most of us think of the prototypical narcissist, we think of the grandiose narcissist: brash, boastful, noisy, and always demanding to be in the spotlight. However, psychologists have also identified a quieter manifestation of narcissism—vulnerable narcissism—characterized by extreme sensitivity to slights and a deep sense of shame over their grandiose desires that leads these individuals to despise the spotlight.
 
Those who score high in grandiose narcissism tend to be antagonistic toward others for reasons relating to their desire to increase their social status and dominance (instrumental social value). Their entitlement is linked to their belief that they are special and superior and therefore deserving of greater resources and treatment. In contrast, those scoring higher in vulnerable narcissism feel hostility and distrust in reaction to their negative ideas about themselves and others, and their response is often rooted in traumatic childhood experiences. Their particular flavor of entitlement seems to be more linked to a belief that they deserve special attention because of their fragility, not their superior characteristics.
 

- Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, 2020

Misconception about 'Maslow’s Pyramid'

Modern-day presentations of Maslow’s theory often leave out this critical notion of an integrated hierarchy and instead focus on the stage-like pyramid—even though in his published writings Maslow never actually created a pyramid to represent his hierarchy of needs.
 
Todd Bridgman and his colleagues examined in detail how the pyramid came to be and concluded that “Maslow’s Pyramid” was actually created by a management consultant in the sixties. From there, it quickly became popular in the emerging field of organization behavior. Bridgman and his colleagues note that the pyramid resonated with the “prevailing [post-war] ideologies of individualism, nationalism and capitalism in America and justified a growing managerialism in bureaucratic (i.e., layered triangular) formats.”
 
Unfortunately, the continual reproduction of the pyramid in management textbooks had the unfortunate consequence of reducing Maslow’s rich and nuanced intellectual contributions to a parody and has betrayed the actual spirit of Maslow’s notion of self-actualization as realizing one’s creative potential for humanitarian ends. As Bridgman and his colleagues noted, “Inspiring the study of management and its relationship to creativity and the pursuit of the common good would be a much more empowering legacy to Maslow than a simplistic, 5-step, one-way pyramid.”
 

- Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, 2020

Life is Sailing

The pyramid from the sixties told a story that Maslow never meant to tell; a story of achievement, of mastering level by level until you’ve “won” the game of life. But that is most definitely not the spirit of self-actualization that the humanistic psychologists emphasized. The human condition isn’t a competition; it’s an experience. Life isn’t a trek up a summit but a journey to travel through—a vast blue ocean, full of new opportunities for meaning and discovery but also danger and uncertainty. In this choppy surf, a clunky pyramid is of little use. Instead, what is needed is something a bit more functional. We’ll need a sailboat.
 
As we sail through the adventure of life, it’s rarely clear sailing. The boat itself protects us from seas that are rarely as calm as we’d like. Each plank of the boat offers security from the waves. Without it, we’d surely spend all our energy trying to stay above water. While even one plank is better than nothing, the bigger the boat, the more waves you can endure. Likewise in life, while safety is an essential foundation for feeling secure, adding on strong connections with others and feelings of respect and worthiness will further allow you to weather the storms.
Having a secure boat is not enough for real movement, however. You also need a sail. Without a sail, you might be protected from water, but you wouldn’t go anywhere. Each level of the sail allows you to capture more wind, helping you explore and adapt to your environment.
 
Note that you don’t “climb” a sailboat like you’d climb a mountain or a pyramid. Instead, you open your sail, just like you’d drop your defenses once you felt secure enough. This is an ongoing dynamic: you can be open and spontaneous one minute but can feel threatened enough to prepare for the storm by closing yourself to the world the next minute. The more you continually open yourself to the world, however, the further your boat will go and the more you can benefit from the people and opportunities around you. And if you’re truly fortunate, you can even enter ecstatic moments of peak experience—where you are really catching the wind. In these moments, not only have you temporarily forgotten your insecurities, but you are growing so much that you are helping to raise the tide for all the other sailboats simply by making your way through the ocean. In this way, the sailboat isn’t a pinnacle but a whole vehicle, helping us to explore the world and people around us, growing and transcending as we do.
 

- Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, 2020

Shaky Foundation of Self-realization

In my career it has become clear that the more we have limiting notions of potential that are dictated by others (schoolteachers, parents, managers, etc.), the more blind we become to the full potential of each and every unique individual and their own unique path to self-actualization and transcendence. My research has convinced me that we all have extraordinary creative, humanitarian, and spiritual possibilities but are often alienated from them because we are so focused on a very narrow slice of who we are. As a result, we aren’t fulfilling our full potential. We spend so much time looking outward for validation that we don’t develop the incredible strengths that already lie within, and we rarely take the time to fulfill our deepest needs in the most growth-oriented and integrated fashion.
 
Indeed, so many people today are striving for “transcendence” without a healthy integration of their other needs—to the detriment of their full potential. This ranges from people who expect a mindfulness retreat or yoga class to be a panacea for their traumas and deep insecurities, to spiritual “gurus” abusing their positions of power, to the many instances of vulnerable people (especially vulnerable young people) seeking unhealthy outlets for transcendence, such as violent extremism, cults, and gangs.
 
We also see this at play among the many divisions we see in the world today. While there is a yearning to be part of a larger political or religious ideology, the realization of this yearning is often built on hate and hostility for the “other,” rather than on pride and deep commitment for a cause that can better humanity. In essence, there is a lot of pseudo-transcendence going on, resting on a “very shaky foundation.”
 

- Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, 2020

From Healthy Self-realization to Transcendence

During Maslow’s later years, he became increasingly convinced that healthy self-realization is actually a bridge to transcendence. Many of the individuals he selected as self-actualizing people experienced frequent moments of transcendence in which awareness was expanded beyond the self, and many of them were motivated by higher values. At the same time, Maslow observed that these individuals had a deep sense of who they were and what they wanted to contribute to the world.
 
This created a deep paradox for Maslow: How could so many of his self-actualizing individuals simultaneously have such a strong identity and actualization of their potential, yet also be so selfless? In a 1961 paper, Maslow observed that self-actualization seems to be a “transitional goal, a rite of passage, a step along the path to the transcendence of identity. This is like saying its function is to erase itself.”
 
Maslow believed that striving toward self-actualization—by developing a strong sense of self and having one’s basic needs met—was a crucial step along this path. As he wrote in his 1962 book Toward a Psychology of Being: “Self-actualization . . . paradoxically makes more possible the transcendence of self, and of self-consciousness and of selfishness.”
 

- Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, 2020

Discipleship (2):Ask the Right Questions to Yourself

1. God, how can you be this good, to adopt me when I’m still unsorted? Practice the discipline of consciously receiving the new identity that comes from adoption. This may not come naturally to you, and you might need to really practice it! But by practicing, we can start doing away with the belief that we have to earn something to be “in.”

2. How am I doing loving the people whom God has placed in my life? What do you notice? What thoughts come up when you consider this question? Where is Jesus out ahead of you, having prepared good works in advance, that you should walk in them like Ephesians 2:8-9 describes? Where and how, this week, is Jesus calling you to love your friends and neighbors in concrete, practical terms?

3. Jesus, what are you speaking to me through your Holy Spirit? Learn to discern how you hear the leading of the Holy Spirit, as you read Scripture and as you listen for his whisper in everyday life. Try to make your response as concrete as possible. If, for example, you sense a need for more rest and greater margin in your life, don’t just say, “I’m going to live slower,” but rather, “I’m going to take three slow, prayerful walks around my neighborhood this week.” The more specific and concrete, the more helpful it is! 

- Bill Hull & Brandon Cook, The False Promise of Discipleship, 2019 

Discipleship (1): Asking the Three Questions in A Small Group

1. The First Question: “How are you experiencing God’s goodness?” This provides space to keep people grounded in an awareness of God’s love, grace, and provision. It’s a way of considering God’s nearness, even in the midst of great challenges. If people are willing to be open and honest about their soul and the suffering they might be walking through, the results can be connectedness and empathy and a mutual sharing of one another’s burdens.

2. The Second Question: “How’s it going with loving the people Jesus has given you to love?” We have very specific categories for these groups, including loved ones (that is, family and friends), spiritual family (that is, our brothers and sisters in Christ), and our neighbors (that is, those around us). Asking the question, “How are you doing loving others?” is the best question for spiritual transformation that lines us up with the mission and heart of Jesus.

3. The Third Question: "What is Jesus speaking to you, and how will you respond this week?” By asking this question with two parts, we place a value on action that goes beyond mere reflection. We coach people toward specificity so that responding in the week ahead is clear and specific, not vague or ambiguous.

- Bill Hull & Brandon Cook, The False Promise of Discipleship, 2019 

The Way to Discipleship

The Jesus way is not only a message for those considering Christ as the answer to the human crisis. It is an explanation of what he is calling every person to do. It is not ambiguous; it requires a faith that gets your legs moving, your mind and heart engaged in learning and obeying. The way of Christ is the way of the disciple (Luke 14:27, 33). Salvation by discipleship alone expects all those called to salvation to follow, learn from, and obey Jesus throughout their lives—no exceptions, no excuses.
 

The only man who has the right to say that he is justified by grace alone is the man who has left all to follow Christ. Such a man knows that the call to discipleship is a gift of grace, and that the call is inseparable from the grace.

 - DIETRICH BONHOEFFER, THE COST OF DISCIPLESHIP

Salvation is by discipleship alone. It is time to wrestle with what that means. That begins with a basic principle: The only way you will experience the fullness of your salvation is through your own discipleship to Christ. Salvation can only be lived through discipleship, and if you don’t live it, you don’t have it. 

 - Bill Hull & Brandon Cook, 

The Cost of Cheap Grace: Reclaiming the Value of Discipleship, 2020.

Discipleship is A State of Being

If we replace the word grace in “salvation by grace alone” with discipleship, we have an entirely different discussion. A disciple is a person who has chosen to position themselves as Jesus’ student or follower. Discipleship is a state of being created by the work of the Holy Spirit combined mysteriously with the human will.
 
Critics object to an emphasis on discipleship because it often functions as shorthand for an individual’s personal growth into Christlikeness. They worry about an inbred understanding of Christian maturity that functions at odds with the great commission. They prefer to emphasize “disciple making” over discipleship. We will set aside the question of whether you can be truly Christlike and not make disciples. But it’s highly doubtful that any significant movement of God has been inhibited by referring to discipleship rather than disciple making. Reasons for the great commission being diminished in the contemporary Christian imagination run much deeper than word choice. You can’t find a church that honors Christ’s words that would not agree that making disciples of all nations is crucial. They have had the language right, but they have used the right language wrongly. The church of cheap grace makes disciples, but the disciples they make are by and large practicing a watered-down, broadened-out discipleship, such that just about anything a church does hits the target.
 
Making new disciples is the starting point for multiplication and the fulfillment of Christ’s mandate to reach the world. In Matthew 28:18-20, the centerpiece of the great commission is the command to “make disciples.” The critics are right both about the priority given by Jesus to disciple making in his gospel, and about the failures of the contemporary church in making disciples. For our discussion, however, making disciples is inherent to discipleship: It is part of our ongoing interaction with Christ, learning from him and participating in his mission.
 
When we use the phrase “salvation by discipleship alone,” we mean that there is only one way to fully experience your salvation, and that is via a lifetime of discipleship to Christ. Everyone who is called to salvation is called to discipleship—no exceptions, no excuses.
 

- Bill Hull & Brandon Cook, 

The Cost of Cheap Grace: Reclaiming the Value of Discipleship, 2020.

The Threat of Discipleship

The only man who has the right to say that he is justified by grace alone is the man who has left all to follow Christ. Such a man knows that the call to discipleship is a gift of grace, and that the call is inseparable from the grace.

- DIETRICH BONHOEFFER, THE COST OF DISCIPLESHIP

 
Dietrich Bonhoeffer makes this assertion as a way of reconciling two seemingly incompatible ideas, at least according to the spirit of the age: grace and discipleship. It is the person who has given the most to his or her salvation, Bonhoeffer recognizes, who understands best that only by grace could they have lived it out. Here Bonhoeffer echoes a powerful call from the apostle Paul: “Work hard to show the results of your salvation, obeying God with deep reverence and fear” (Philippians 2:12, NLT). The more you place yourself at risk, the more profound are your experiences of grace and mercy—you come to know, at a bone-deep level, that it is all by grace. This is a knowledge that is never gained by semiobedient people or by the majority of Christians.
 
Bonhoeffer was significantly influenced by Martin Luther. He agreed with Luther’s emphasis on “justification by faith alone” (a companion assertion to the clichéd “salvation by grace alone”) and defended it. In fact, Bonhoeffer lamented the damage that had been done to Luther’s teaching:
 

Nonetheless, what emerged victorious from Reformation history was not Luther’s recognition of pure, costly grace, but the alert religious instinct of human beings for the place where grace could be had the cheapest. Only a small, hardly noticeable distortion of the emphasis was needed, and that most dangerous and ruinous deed was done. . . . Luther knew that this grace had cost him one life and daily continued to cost him, for he was not excused by grace from discipleship, but instead was all the more thrust into it.

 

- Bill Hull & Brandon Cook, 

The Cost of Cheap Grace: Reclaiming the Value of Discipleship, 2020.