There I am, pushing my cart through a supermarket in my new home of Lagos, Portugal – cod fish on one side, pastéis de nata on the other – when a song comes on and transports me straight back to college. Not because of the cod fish.
Actually, this experience happens often for me here… whether I’m in the hardware store, my gym, the clothing boutiques along the cobblestone streets.
American music, everywhere, all the time… and almost always, an ongoing string of love songs. Or heartbreak songs. Or, more accurately, songs about not being able to survive without someone.
Which is what brings the late Wayne Dyer back to mind – he died in 2015, but his ideas are very much alive… at least in my head.
The book that started it all
Back in 1976, I was a young college student when a brilliant psychologist named Wayne Dyer published his first book, which would go on to sell over 35 million copies around the world. He called it Your Erroneous Zones.
In it, Dr. Wayne named the cultural forces that reinforce what he called approval-seeking… the learned belief that our worth, our happiness, our very survival depends on what others think of us and whether they will stay around.
He listed them plainly, and at the top of the list was popular songs.
He nailed it, even back then, calling it “the profusion of cultural approval-seeking messages.” Think about that: cultural approval-seeking messages, meaning the songs aren’t just entertainment. Oh no, they’re instructions. And the lesson, repeated ten thousand times before you reach adulthood, is that you are not enough on your own. Suddenly, the endless loop of love songs playing in the background of our lives starts to feel a lot less romantic.
This pining is as old as time
Of course, the pining for a lost love (or a love you could never have) is as old as music itself. Troubadours sang it, poets have been writing it for centuries, and every generation gets its own lovesick version that sounds like the first time anyone has ever felt this way.
In our lifetimes, Bill Withers told us the sun literally doesn’t shine when she’s gone. Nilsson sang that he can’t live if living is without you, and the crack in his voice wasn’t performance – it was the sound of a man who meant every word.
The Hollies elevated love to the same category as oxygen: all I need is the air that I breathe, and to love you. Then came Dolly, pleading with a stranger not to take her man because she simply can’t compete, and Bonnie Tyler calling for a hero in the dead of the night. Lewis Capaldi, voice breaking on a track that became a generation’s anthem, sang about the emptiness of a life with no one to hold it together (11 million likes).
And now? For the younger generation, Olivia Rodrigo drives past a lover’s street at night, unable to stop. Gracie Abrams, the Gen Z poet of heartbreak, makes an art form of the apology that comes too late.
How far does it go back? Probably since the first human picked up an instrument and tried to put the ache into sound. The through-line never changes: without you, I am nothing. I cannot breathe, function, or survive.
This Is What Brainwashing Sounds Like
What makes it so powerful, and so insidious is that the conditioning doesn’t feel like conditioning – it feels like romance. The songs are beautiful, the tunes are catchy and they make the longing feel noble, even heroic.
Dying of heartbreak gets the orchestra, while self-sufficiency gets nothing! Nobody writes a hit song about being complete on your own.
Okay, there are a few exceptions…
Whitney Houston told us that learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all, and it hit number one. Gospel music has always known something the pop charts don’t. Sufi devotional music, kirtan, the great spiritual traditions of the world – these have always sung about inner wholeness, about connection to something larger than romantic longing.
But they’re not what’s blasting in the supermarket in Lagos (or around the world), and they never have been.
The labels and the algorithms favor the longing, and so the longing gets reinforced – endlessly, from the first love song you hear as a child to the playlist you’re swimming in right now.
As a young woman who measured her worth by whether someone wanted her, I was stopped dead in my tracks by Your Erroneous Zones.
What Wayne Dyer knew about love songs
Dr. Wayne had a way of naming things plainly, and he nailed what’s behind the terror of being without someone – the kind these songs are full of. That terror doesn’t come from loving someone too much, he said, it comes from not loving yourself enough. The gap you’re trying to fill with another person was never theirs to fill.
And to a young woman still trying to make sense of a childhood that offered very little of either love or belonging, those words landed like a lifeline.
Dr. Wayne said you have to love yourself first – not as a precondition for deserving love from others, but because self-love is the foundation on which everything else is built. “To the extent that we love ourselves,” he wrote, “we have the ability to love others.”
He also said something I have returned to many times in my own life and work: “You cannot be lonely if you like the person you’re alone with.”
Read that again. It’s not a dismissal of love or connection – it’s a reordering.
Learning to Like the Person You’re Alone With
In our Emotional Liberation work, this lands as both realization and invitation. Our old stories tell us we are not enough – that we are defective, unworthy, unlovable – and from that place, connection becomes desperate. We need the other person not because we love them freely, but because without them, we can’t bear ourselves.
That’s not love, that’s a survival strategy.
The songs know this, I believe. They’re not really about the other person – they’re about the unbearable feeling of being alone with yourself when you haven’t yet learned to like who that is.
Wayne Dyer told us that 50 years ago, and it’s still true. Yet, the supermarket in Lagos (and everywhere else!) is still playing the same lesson, just with better production. If we see it for what it it, the work – the real work – is learning to be the person you don’t want to leave.
If this resonates with you, I’d love to connect. My monthly Elevation Ceremony is a free online gathering and the gentlest way into this work.
Or if you’re ready to go deeper, the best next step is a complimentary Discovery Session. You’ll complete a short intake form, then we’ll meet on Zoom to discuss and explore what’s possible. Either way, you don’t navigate this alone – and that’s not a contradiction. That’s the point.
With Love,
Becca
I don’t think I ever read that book, but I remember the cover. I also remember reading a review that really slagged it. The reviewer quoted a quiz in the book. One of the questions was “Have you learned to fail effectively?” “What does he mean?” asked the reviewer. I think the review influenced me and led me not to read the book, despite its popularity.
I didn’t follow his work closely after the first book… but that bit in his first one really stuck with me and continues to stand true in regard to the cultural brainwashing that we’re no-one without someone.