We live in an aspiration-driven culture that is rooted in instant gratification.

We live in an aspiration-driven culture that is rooted in instant gratification. We find it difficult to enact or even accept incremental progress. Which is exactly what you need to cultivate meaningful long-term change.

We live in an aspiration-driven culture that is rooted in instant gratification. We find it difficult to enact or even accept incremental progress. Which is exactly what you need to cultivate meaningful long-term change. People get frustrated and demoralized when things don’t happen quickly. It’s natural. It’s normal. But it’s another way we’re set up to fail.

We live in a society which on the one hand pressurizes us into the pursuit of instant gratification, and the other hand imposes on whole sectors of the population and endless deferment of fulfillment.

As a society, we’re so focused on instantaneous gratification that our short-term solutions often become long-term problems.

Remember, we live in a culture of immediacy. We live in a culture in which simplistic answers override more complicated answers. We live in a culture in which language is reduced to its bare bones. We live in a culture in which language is now in the service of violence.

What I've been seeing going on -- and it's exciting that it might be changing even though it will be painful -- is this whole culture driven by consumption on every level. Not just monetary consumption, but consumption of experiences and time. I feel that as a culture that most of us are incapable of slowing down and having a real experience. You keep thinking that if you get another house or take another vacation or that if you make more money, that it will free you up. But it becomes a larger and larger web of entrapment.

..begin by talking about the kind of existentialist chaos that exists in our own lives and our inability to overcome the sense of alienation and frustration we experience when we try to create bonds of intimacy and solidarity with one another. Now part of this frustration is to be understood again in relation to structures and institutions. In the way in which our culture of consumption has promoted an addiction to stimulation - one that puts a premium on packaged and commodified stimulation. The market does this to convince us that our consumption keeps oiling the economy for it to reproduce itself. But the effect of this addiction to stimulation is an undermining, a waning of our ability for qualitatively rich relationships.

"This is a culture that is very hostile to complacency," said one executive. "We have an itch that what we just accomplished, no matter how great, is never going to be good enough to sustain us," said another.

Our culture today is obsessively focused on unrealistically positive expectations: Be happier. Be healthier. Be the best, better than the rest. Be smarter, faster, richer, sexier, more popular, more productive, more envied, and more admired. Be perfect and amazing and crap out twelve-karat-gold nuggets before breakfast each morning while kissing your selfie-ready spouse and two and a half kids goodbye. Then fly your helicopter to your wonderfully fulfilling job, where you spend your days doing incredibly meaningful work that’s likely to save the planet one day.

our culture has made it harder to be good,

Instant gratification takes too long.

I think we live in an insane culture. By insane, I mean a culture that does not meet real human needs. It meets our physical and economic needs, for the most part, for many people — at least in the privileged West. But at the same time, it alienates people. It cuts people off from themselves, from their gut feelings, from nature [and] from other people. It sets people against each other. We're destroying the earth. It's a very unhealthy system that we're living in right now. So where's hope in that? Hope in that is people realizing that we live in troubled times, to look for solutions within themselves and within their communities and ... recognizing our spiritual nature, that we have needs beyond the physical ones. We have to look at the other needs we have that this way of life just does not satisfy.

There seems to be an attitude problem, as if we cannot shake ourselves out of a mindset of limited achievement.