As more workers enter the service sector, increasing numbers [are] complaining about jobs that provide them with little satisfaction. Not to romanticize the wonderful work on assembly lines, but people had a sense that they were creating products that served some higher purpose than making a buck--that they were serving the common good. Most working people have a deep desire to serve some higher purpose or goal than their own financial needs, and the deprivation of [this] ability is one of the important sources of their stress.

Equally important, more and more people spend all day learning how to get others to want their products or services, and this requires investing a great deal of effort in manipulating and controlling the consciousness of others. Sometimes we are selling a product. But often what we are selling is ourselves, particularly in the professions.

We need others to see us as desirable products, so that they will buy us, our services, our product, our way of doing things. [We] go to seminars to become the right person to sell. This creates narcissistic human beings who know how to treat others as objects, and rarely as subjects or as embodiments of God's spirit.

People feel alone and isolated, surrounded by a hostile world. They find it increasingly difficult to trust others. They hate being part of that kind of a world, yet to be realistic they feel they must be part of it, and that there is little they can do to change it so they'd better protect themselves as best they can.