What Do We Think We Are Selling?

By Audrey Stallsmith

“We unconsciously think of ourselves as objects for sale on the market,” Thomas Merton writes in Love and Living. “We want to be wanted. We want to attract customers.”

That seems especially apt for freelance writers such as myself, since we are supposed to sell ourselves to sell our work. In the modern parlance, we must have “brands.” That, in my view, makes us products rather than people--or just a labeled part of the herd! 

Any idea of having to advertise myself rouses aversion in my introvert-ish soul, which probably is why I’m not a very successful freelance writer! But it isn’t just we freelancers who have to sell ourselves anymore. Everybody seems to be trying to do that on social media to earn “likes.” To earn validation, in other words. And teens who don’t get it apparently often fall into despair, as suicide rates have risen along with the rise of so-called social media, which can facilitate bullying as much as it does more positive interaction.

Although I’ve avoided most forms of social media myself, due to considering them a waste of time, I do post photos on a gardening website and sometimes find myself sneaking onto that site to see whether those photos have received any likes. Why, I have to ask myself, do we crave so much feedback? Are we forgetting that the original selling of oneself was either into slavery or prostitution? 

It reminds me of a verse I recently read in Matthew about Jewish leaders “who loved the praise of men more than the praise of God.” We apparently do the same. I can’t help feeling that, if we truly believed that the King approved of us, we wouldn’t feel the need for so much validation from those who are considerably lower on the spectrum! And the taunts of bullies would lose their power to hurt us.

Since most of us aren’t there yet, I’m guessing that—though we have been told over and over again that God loves us—we aren’t really buying that idea. Or maybe we dismiss it because we know that God loves everybody, so His love doesn’t count in some sense. Or perhaps we haven’t yet learned that, as God Himself has illustrated for us, real love is more about giving than getting. 

Merton, who was a Trappist monk, goes on to remind us that “To love you have to. . .grow up to the maturity of giving, without concern for getting anything special in return. Love is not a deal, it is a sacrifice.”

We can’t, after all, control how much love we get, but we can control how much love we give. Some people are going to dislike us no matter what we do—and probably especially dislike us if we are trying too hard to please them! There is, after, all a perverse element in human relationships that makes us inclined to value the things or people we don’t have more than those we do.

Dad was just complaining the other day about one of his neighbors from the “good old days” who, rather than bequeathing his possessions to the sister who had assiduously cared for him, left them all to another relative who was a virtual stranger instead. Actually, the reason Dad brought the subject up was because we’d just heard that an acquaintance had left his money to a relative he seldom saw rather than to the neighbors who had done the most for him. The reason this happens so often is, I suspect, because distant relatives or friends aren’t on hand to bug us as much as do those from whom we have to receive help—and who therefore know our weaknesses far too well!         

So we Christians who have been adjured to be good neighbors to those who need us had better learn not to expect much in return. Once we make God and his love the ground of our being we can, as Merton assures us, like a seed “dissolve in that ground in order to become fruitful. One disappears into Love, in order to ‘be Love.’” 

We then will be growing in the original garden where we no longer will be, as he puts it, “afraid of death or the devil of poverty or failure,” not to mention the devil of unpopularity! And, there, we will require no egos in which to clothe ourselves.