How to Get Over Yourself
“It takes energy and struggle to ignore how much we receive and how little we return to the world."
Brad Sloan is the founder and manager of a non-profit organization. He is comfortable financially and has a loving wife and son. Brad has a wonderful life, and he doesn’t know it. Emotionally, Brad is an insecure, neurotic mess.
The cause of his suffering: Brad wants the world to acknowledge his “specialness,” and the world won’t.
Brad, played by Ben Stiller in the Amazon Prime comedy film Brad’s Status, is a fictional creation of Mike White. White, a talented director, writer, and actor, is the creator of the HBO hit series The White Lotus. He is one of the most astute observers of the human condition working in Hollywood today.
White takes us inside Brad’s head to see how Brad’s fixation on status is ruining his life.
Brad seeks status through his college-bound son, whom he accompanies on campus visitation tours. Waiting during his son’s interview at Harvard, he eagerly tells another parent about his son’s accomplishments. “What does your son do?” he then asks. The other parent icily replies, “What does he do? He goes to high school.”
On the campus tour, Brad meets two females seeking admission to Harvard. Brad wonders why he never met such women in his college years. He fantasizes the coeds idolize him and fall in love with him as they romp on a sunny beach.
Out to dinner with an old college friend who is now famous, Brad is stunned and angered when the friend reveals he never thought of Brad as a rival. You can hear the wheels turning in Brad’s head, Wasn’t I good enough to be a worthy competitor?
He imagines other friends' lives—their cars, planes, mansions, and early retirements. All this is out of reach in his ordinary life. More money, he thinks, will bring him more status.
Brad takes no responsibility. Self-deceived, he blames his wife Melanie for his middling success, thinking Melanie is so easily satisfied. Her contentment undermines my ambition.
Brad never enjoys the present moment; he lives in his thinking, continually comparing the present to what might have been had he more status. Where did it all go wrong? he ruminates over and over.
Brad lives his life filtered through his search for status; his experience of the present moment is distorted.
His thinking is stuck on rehearsing thoughts about what should have happened. He is trapped in the illusion that the present moment is merely a portal to some future moment when the world will love him the way he deserves.
Whew! No wonder Brad is in a constant state of low-grade misery. The needs of Brad’s self-identity are always at the forefront of his thinking.
Now is the only moment love and happiness can be experienced. When, in the present moment, we relinquish (at least temporarily) the demands of our status-seeking self-identity, we can experience love and happiness.
Brad is waiting for his status to change before he can be happy. He has confused cause and effect. He thinks his unfulfilled present is the cause of his tedious, self-centered thinking. Instead, his self-centered thinking is the cause of his present unhappiness.
As a result, Brad’s level of insecurity is off the charts. Watching Brad’s Status prompts reflection on times we’ve felt insecure when we’ve attached our well-being to something occurring in the world.
No amount of status will ever bring the peace and happiness we seek.
Jeff Foster, in his book The Deepest Acceptance, offers testimony that mirrors Brad’s angst:
I had many images of myself that I had been trying to uphold, many demands regarding how I wanted to be seen and how I wanted to see myself. I wanted to see myself, and to be seen, as successful and attractive and intelligent and kind and good and compassionate and talented. But life kept getting in the way of these demands. Life simply wouldn’t let me be who I wanted to be. Life just didn’t understand me. People just didn’t get me. Nobody would ever understand me! My frustrated expectations of life and my constant judgments of myself brought pain, and I hated the pain and didn’t want to experience it any longer.
Like Brad, Foster thought the “individual me had to somehow hold up, support, and sustain something called ‘my life’—to orchestrate it, to make it go the way I wanted it to, to be in control of it.”
Another false belief magnified Foster’s pain: “Everyone else seemed to know who they were, what they were doing, where they were going.” The result of his mistaken ideas was depression. Foster didn’t like himself and the world he experienced mirrored that back to him.
Few of us are unfamiliar with the drive for acceptance that Jeff and Brad experienced.
The work of David K. Reynolds offers unique and actionable insights to help overcome our funk.