“Aspirational Porn” and the Life You “Can’t Have”
Do you ever see a post on social media that fills you with wanderlust?
Maybe it begins as lust, but then turns to envy, discontent or anger — anger because the poster is blatantly flaunting their fortunate life, while you’re faced with the grind of your job, debt, and day-to-day drudgery?
Chelsea Fagan recently wrote that ‘aspirational porn… serves the dual purpose of tantalizing the viewer with a life they cannot have while making them feel like some sort of failure for not being able to have it.”
She also says that those who encourage others to follow their “very rare path are a##holes” — the person who “posts vapid “inspirational” quotes that only apply to a tiny percent of the population who already has all the basics covered.”
And while I agree with her about people who encourage you to pursue their unique path, there’s much more of what she’s written that rubs me wrong.
Maybe it’s because I’m not a ‘basics covered’ kind of person. Sure, I would be, if I believed that ‘playing it safe’ was more important than actually playing.
But that’s not what I believe, or how I live. I believe in being an addict to ‘aspirational porn’ because without it we run the risk of living a life of “quiet desperation.”
It does us good to be reminded on occasion how good life could be, if only we gave up giving up, and started aspiring toward something better.
Not better in ‘my-life-is-more-awesome-than-yours’ comparison. But etter in an ‘I’m-actually-living-the-kind-of-life-I-want-to-live’ sort of way, instead of acquiescing to the 9–5 rut for the sake of ‘financial security’ and ‘doing-the-responsible-thing-because-I-have-to-do-it’.
We need to have aspirations. We need to have big dreams that challenge us. We need to question, every day, whether we are doing what we love, or just doing what we ‘have to’ to pay the bills.
Our ultimate fulfillment — our satisfaction with the life we’ve lived once we reach death’s bed — will be determined by our answer to that question on a daily basis.
Maybe if we’re bothered by the ‘aspirational porn’ we see on social media, we should really analyze if what we’re doing (for a living, for a life) matters to us.
No, we don’t have to travel. No, we don’t have to leave our corner of the world in order to find joy, peace, beauty or fulfillment. No, we don’t have to totally ignore money making and throw our financial future out the window.
But yes, we should get excited about what we’re doing on a daily basis. We should feel passionate about it.
We shouldn’t acquiesce to living an okay life because we’re “doing the responsible thing’ while those ‘lucky a##holes’ are “patting themselves on the back for living a life that anyone with money can buy.”
That’s it right there. That’s where what she wrote rubs me wrong. It’s ‘us’ and ‘them’ — the ‘genetic lottery’ winners who get to live the life they want because they have a safety net waiting for them when things don’t quite work out, vs. the poor victims who have to work hard to create their own safety net.
We don’t have the luxury of doing what we really want to do. We’re too busy paying the bills. So stop rubbing it in our face, and “making us feel like failures for not being able to have it.”
Hogwash.
We don’t live in that world anymore. Maybe 100 years ago. But not now.
My husband was homeless at the age of 16. He worked hard to graduate from high school (while holding down a job), got a scholarship for college, served a mission for his church, and married up (if I do so say myself).
But not by much. My dad had job after job while I was a kid. He declared bankruptcy at least once. One year we only had a Christmas because of generous neighbors and friends. Sometimes we only ate because of welfare. Growing up it was either feast or famine.
Together, we have seven kids. By US standards, our income places us below the poverty line.
But we’re living a life of the ‘rich and famous’. Not because it was easy, or handed to us on the proverbial silver platter. It’s through sheer grit and determination.
As a family, we’ve traveled to 35+ countries on five continents.
My husband is currently leading a trip to Mongolia with two of our teens.
All the while we’re homeschooling our kids, working on getting out of debt, building my husband’s mentoring career, and growing our online business.
We’re certainly not ‘genetic lottery’ winners. We don’t have an ‘upper class’ safety net that gives us the ‘extreme privilege’ to get out there and see the world.
Travel is something we decided was important to us. So we made big, risky decisions (especially financial ones), and did things that weren’t always ‘safe’ or ‘responsible’, in order to design our lifestyle around something that really mattered.
We dreamed, we risked, we dared. And we failed. More than once. But failure is fertilizer and helps you to grow bigger than you would by playing it safe.
Travel has made us better, wiser and cultured. No, it does NOT make us more worthy than others who haven’t traveled. And yes, you can become better, wiser and cultured by staying at home. But that’s not really my point.
For me, it’s not about travel. When I share ‘aspirational porn’ there’s a different message I want to send.
There are some who simply do not have the same opportunities that we do. They can’t travel. They can’t go to college. They struggle every day just to put food on the table (literally).
We’ve sat with them, in a humble homes the size of my bedroom, around a bed that doubled as a table, while being served a meal prepared in our (unearned) honor.
The people who don’t have the chance to aspire to something greater aren’t the ones irritated by ‘aspirational porn’ on social media.
We are not victims of circumstance.
We (the ones who have laptops and internet and the ability to read, especially English) have the power to create the kind of life we dream of living, no matter how impossible, unrealistic, or badly it will look on our resume.
We don’t have to acquiesce to 40 years of servitude just to create an illusion of financial security (especially in the day of the digital nomad).
Security is a superstition… there is no such thing as job security or financial security. It does not exist.
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. — Helen Keller
Take the example of the pre-WWII grandmother of a German friend of ours. She and her husband enjoyed great financial security. They were the multi-generational owners of a vast estate in Eastern Germany. They had abundance, servants, gardens, herds, luxury, and comfort.
Pregnant with their fifth child, her husband was drafted into the Nazi army. While he was away, neighbors came to tell her that she had five minutes — to pack whatever she could carry — before the Russians arrived. Generations of security were lost in just five minutes.
She took what little she could, along with her four children, and left. Now she was a refugee.
She gave birth to her fifth son on the way to — God knows where — and seriously considered whether it would be worth sparing his life or if there would be enough food to feed the other children and him. (The baby did live, and grew up to be the father of the friend who told us the story).
She spent the rest of her life in poverty, struggling to feed her five children, raising potatoes in a 3-meter square plot and gathering eggs from a couple of hens.
Security doesn’t exist. We can work a lifetime to obtain it, and it can be taken from us in an instant. If we fully understood that, would we make different decisions than we do now?
We do have a choice to not ‘worry’ about money, to not make it our all-consuming priority. Because even if we do place it as the highest priority of life, we could still end up on the streets. It’s happened before. Stock market crashes. Business failures. Layoffs. And not just because we — God forbid — took time off to backpack Eastern Europe or traipse around South America.
Money is important. Money is a tool that can help us have better life experiences, more stability, and greater comfort.
But too often we use ‘financial responsibility’ as a cop-out to avoid taking bigger life risks. We use it as an alibi to evade facing the gnawing inside that tells us our life lacks meaning.
“Nothing about your ability or inability to travel means anything about you as a person,” Fagan says.
Yes, and no. Replace the word ‘travel’ with ‘pursue your dream’, and yes, it speaks volumes about you as a person.
If we give up on pursuing our dreams — whether it’s to travel or to start a bakery or to pursue a ‘useless’ degree that will probably not result in a good job — then what’s the point of life? Only to earn a living? To pay the bills?
That’s not life. That existing.
Sometimes we view ‘aspirational porn’ and we feel bad or guilty because it makes us discontent with what we have, with the current circumstances of our life. It makes us want something different, and for now, we can’t have it and don’t believe we ever could.
That’s our first mistake, believing that we’re not ‘lucky enough’ to create a life different from what seems logical or reasonable.
Our second mistake is equating discontent with ingratitude. We can be grateful for what we have, enjoy life today, here, now, and still be discontent — without it, we would never grow, progress, reach new heights.
Move forward with life, enjoying each day as much as you can, but all the while making changes, taking baby steps toward what you really want.
Sometimes we’ll discover that something we think we really want, isn’t that important to us after all. Often we’ll discover that the journey toward the goal is the most rewarding part of the ‘aspiration’.
But if we acquiesce to ‘financial security’, ‘responsibility’ or ‘safety’, and never allow ourselves to dream, to be discontent, to risk, to venture and dare — then we miss out on many of the greatest rewards of living — the rewards that come only to those who dare greatly.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena… who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. — Theodore Roosevelt
There’s a thin line between faith and foolishness, between dreaming big and insanity. We wouldn’t recommend the choices we’ve made to anyone as principle… they were bold and dangerous and led us through some VERY difficult times.
We don’t recommend not worrying about the money at all. We’ve tried that. In the long run, it doesn’t make pursuing your dream life financially sustainable.
Yet ultimately, our choices have led us to our success. We wouldn’t be where we are, living the life we WANT to live, without the risks we’ve taken.
“Everyone needs to forge their own path”, yes, even if it includes “wandering around, taking your time and trying a bunch of new things.”
But not because you are ‘lucky enough’ to know “security will be waiting for you at the end of the rainbow”. Not one of us will ever have that. Not one.
I do encourage people — not to follow my ‘rare path’, but their own — one that is truly, undeniably, passionately theirs.
There’s no need to “feel guilt or shame” over the ‘privilege’ or pursuing it, and it’s not reserved for a “tiny percent of the population who has the basics covered.” It is the way to spiritual enlightenment and meaning. It is what life is about, and where true fulfillment is found.
And when life is over, and we analyze how well we’ve lived, no safety net in the bank will make that reality sting any less.
Rachel Denning is a mentor and mother to seven children, writer, blogger, and education revolutionist.
She shares aspirational porn and worldschooling adventures on her Instagram and personal blog.
She and her husband founded WorldSchoolAcademy.com.
