“The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.” — Morrie Schwartz
Topic: Our Culture — Why society's values fail us and how to create your own
Morrie has been building toward this lesson for weeks. Every previous teaching — on death, money, emotions, aging — has circled around the same core problem: the culture in which we live does not help us become good, happy, or fulfilled people. It actively works against these goals.
American culture, Morrie argues, teaches people to value the wrong things. It rewards competition over cooperation. It glorifies consumption over contentment. It celebrates individual achievement while neglecting community. It worships youth, beauty, and wealth while dismissing wisdom, character, and service.
Morrie's prescription is deceptively simple: create your own culture. Do not accept the values that are handed to you by advertising, media, and social convention. Examine them. Test them against your own experience. And if they do not serve you — if they do not make you kinder, happier, or more connected to others — reject them.
This is harder than it sounds. Culture is ambient. It surrounds you like air. You breathe it in without noticing. The messages about what you should want, who you should be, and how you should measure your life are so pervasive that they feel like facts rather than opinions. Morrie's challenge is to recognize that they are opinions — and to choose different ones.
Creating your own culture means deliberately choosing your values rather than inheriting them. It means asking: What do I believe about success? About love? About how to spend my time? And answering those questions based on your own experience and reflection, not on what you have been told by a society that profits from your insecurity.
Despite his critique of culture, Morrie is not cynical about human nature. He believes people are fundamentally good — compassionate, generous, capable of love. The problem is not human nature. The problem is the cultural system that distorts it.
People become mean, selfish, and fearful when they feel threatened. And modern culture keeps people in a constant state of threat — threatening their status, their income, their appearance, their relevance. A culture built on anxiety produces anxious people. A culture built on love would produce loving people.
More money, higher status, better appearance. Compare yourself to others. Win at all costs. Buy your way to happiness.
Build community. Invest in relationships. Give generously. Define success by the love you give and receive, not by what you accumulate.
Morrie believes in community — real community, not the shallow networking that passes for connection in professional life. He points out that people need community at every stage of life, not just in childhood and old age:
In the beginning of life, when we are infants, we need others to survive, right? And at the end of life, when you get like me, you need others to survive, right? But here's the secret: in between, we need others as well. We just don't acknowledge it.
Morrie has created his own culture — a small, intimate world centered on his home, his visitors, and his conversations. In Morrie's culture:
This culture is not utopian. It is simply honest. It recognizes human needs — for connection, for meaning, for acknowledgment — and organizes itself around meeting them.
Morrie acknowledges that rejecting cultural norms requires courage. When everyone around you is chasing money, it takes strength to say, "I choose love instead." When the culture tells you to hide your tears, it takes courage to cry. When society rewards busyness, it takes deliberate will to slow down and be present.
But the alternative — living according to values you never chose, pursuing goals that do not fulfill you, measuring yourself by standards that guarantee dissatisfaction — is worse. Much worse. It is, Morrie suggests, a kind of living death.
What cultural values have you absorbed without questioning? If you could design your own personal culture — your own rules for how to live — what would be different from the mainstream?