Media inspires the creation of and belief in a consumerist, material identity as life itself, and the survival of life itself happens only through the survival of this artificially created and media maintained identity. Given that this identity almost totally identifies itself with the material and external world, it does all it can to ignore the intuitive impulse toward our becoming self. This identity seeks the endless distractions that the world has to offer, an endless consumption of that world and of its own life. Even as this identity becomes consumed by the dominator/conformist/media model of existence, this identity feels that it devours the other. The more powerless this identity becomes in creating its own internal integrity and authenticity based on its own ability to see reality and the world on its own terms, the more fragile power it feels through the identification of the things that this identity believes it has, it owns, it possesses.
What this identity feels it possesses, has, and owns the most fully is the identity itself. This identity has, possesses, owns itself as a thing as much or more than it has a car or a job or an exotic vacation or a home theater or a massively expensive wedding or any other latest-thing that a thing-driven world has to offer. This identity invests all of its way of life into this artificial existence, and this ego self-justifies that existence and defends that existence against all comers. That means this ego defends against any or all possibilities of this identity's making a new choice based on a critical moment, a moment of cognitive dissonance which makes very clear the falsity and fallacy of the meaning perspective that drives this chosen lifestyle in any or most of its parts. Oddly, it isn't any one specific material choice this identity makes that does the most harm. It is the essential choice of keeping up for its own sake, not with what was called "keeping up with the Jones's" sometime ago, that does the most harm. Keeping up with keeping up for its own sake, keeping up with keeping up, that makes all the rest of these lifestyle choices mandatory and increasingly harmful to that identity and to the whole being of which it is an integral part. The only permanent thing about a lifestyle comes in living automatically and irresistibly according to that media driven style and no longer a conscious perspective or choice about our own way of life. For "style" in that phrase we can read artificially, media created "meaning perspective." All the chasing after the material, the buying and discarding and buying and discarding over and over again, serves only as the ephemeral activity of the choice of living in a equally disposable lifestyle rather than making a real individuating choice about the life we choose to live.[172]
The more this identity lifestyle feels threatened, the more this ego will defend it. We discussed that in the stories of the ADHD students who identified with their label and the student who cheated on her Diabetes 2 diet and died. The more this identity feels threatened by an instructive reality, the more this ego says that it can't really think about change. It can't change. Change is too big. Change is too hard. It's what this ego says this identity can't do because this identity feels the loss of any part of its lifestyle will lead to the death of the entire lifestyle and thus to life itself. This identity and this ego fear their answer to Fromm's question about the nature of having: "If you are what you have, and you lose what you have, what are you?" This identity and this ego answer that question: "dead, extinguished, nonexistent, lost, chaotic." The media/advertising/dominator, conformist meaning perspective tells us there is no life beyond lifestyle, and any of us who consume the having meaning perspective and are consumed by that meaning perspective will believe that idea and fear.