I thought EWI would enjoy this article by an "energy therapist". In my opinion her attitude toward money clearly reflects the mindset of having lived in a credit bubble for so long that we have forgotten that real money is something that is rare and precious.
The author says we should experience a "positive, peaceful" feeling when we spend money and more money will come to us. If we worry about having a lack of money after spending it then lack will come back to us. We should walk around with a lot of cash in our wallets so that we train our subconscious minds to create more money.
--Susan
Back in 1985, The Elliott Wave Theorist referred to one key manifestation of the emerging bull market as an “’I'm sick of hearing the negative!' psychology.” The mood was reflected in the sudden popularity of Rocky, a film that expressed a shared belief that “you can succeed (or at least avoid the natural state of failure) if you try like hell and push yourself to the limit,” the election of a 'bootstrap' president, Ronald Reagan in 1980, and the rise of all kinds of “self-help” gurus, from Tony Robins to Oprah, Stephen Covey, Tom Peters and Suze Orman. This article appears to mark the extreme outer limit in the self-help movement. In this northernmost realm, money is no longer a matter of effort but a means to “joy and happiness” that is not to be worried about, just trust and let it be there for you.”
This "don't worry, be rich" approach to personal betterment brings to a close a self-help movement that actually dates back to the 1880s, the powerful center of a Grand Supercycle degree bull market. According to an article, "Religion, Science and 'Positive Thinking' in Self-Help Literature," in the Journal of Media and Religion, "positive thinking" is the genre's central concept. Positive thinking is the very bullish belief that "people can become healthy and happy by thinking positive thoughts, thereby implying that individuals in isolation can accomplish the restorative healing regularly attributed to social interaction." The article describes a classic bull market progression from a reliance on alternative religious notions to argue that individuals should practice positive thinking from 1880 to 1910 to a more scientific exploration of "'negative' root cuases of ill health and unhappiness" from the 1940s through the 1960s, the middle of the last Supercycle advance (1932-2000). Finally, the article concludes,"By the 1980s and '90s," self help became a popular psychology "that encouraged readers to place negative thoughts in the past and envision only a positive future." The article on the left must be representative of the end of that trend because it's simply not possible for people to get any more positive than they are when the act of spending creates "a positive, peaceful feeling and trust" that the spending itself creates a "vacuum for more money to come into" one's life. As any cycle theorist will you, at such times, trends can only roll back in the opposite direction. So the next phase should bring a more bearish series of instructional books and tapes in which money has its limits, laziness can be a virtue and success is for losers.
Fringe elements of a new focus on the power of negative thinking are already starting to appear. One is a series of happiness studies that are suddenly discovering the limits on pleasure that results from having money:
Study: Money Won't Make You Happy
Money won't buy happiness, says a group of distinguished economists and psychologists.
"Would you be happier if you were richer?" ask Princeton researcher Daniel Kahneman, PhD, and colleagues. Kahneman shared the 2002 Nobel Prize for applying the principles of psychology to economics.
Their answer: No. It's just an illusion that wealth brings happiness.
Fox News, June 30, 2006
A book on the precipice of the NY Times Top 10 non-fiction bestseller list (#16), Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, illustrates that happiness is being transformed into a far more complex emotion than the version that held sway through the last two or three decades of rising social mood. “Human beings are forever wrongly predicting what will make them happy,” says a NY Times review titled, “The Joy of Delusion. “Because of logic-processing errors our brains tend to make, we don't want the things that would make us happy — and the things that we want (more money, say, or a bigger house or a fancier car) won't make us happy.” In one sense it's “happy” coincidence; the new mindset will fit perfectly with a shrinking money supply and a retrenching demand for housing and luxury autos. Of course, most people aren't going to be real happy about the losses that will accompany the new trend. But at least the realization that money isn’t everything is a lot healthier than the dangerous, peak-era illusion that “there is plenty of money for you and everyone else."
|
