A partner in a successful Madison Avenue ad agency, Don Draper is a hounded-by-demons, train wreck of a man. We sympathize with his hard-luck back-story, but also see Draper as uptight, unreadable, unhappy and using alcohol and promiscuity to cope. Seriously handsome (Jon Hamm), intriguingly mysterious, catnip to a long line of women, and advertising rock star, he is just one of many superficial and insecure characters on Mad Men.
The superficiality is not a writer fail—the roles are fully fleshed on the AMC television show that covers midcentury life in glamorous Manhattan and its bedroom communities. Business is good, profits are generated, yet by creative design, each main character on Mad Men lacks any concern for the fate of others or for any lasting personal bond or intimacy—at home or at work—and each suffers from its absence.
In the 21st century, the shallow character of many flamboyant but insecure self-branding male and female ballers is well known and frequently bemoaned. But until the advent of Mad Men, the 1950s and 60s were regularly portrayed as salt-of-the-earth simpler times. Workingmen were sentimentalized as dependable wage earners, husbands and fathers, and stay-at-home women were romanticized as the uncomplicated and competent torchbearers of domestic bliss.
In fact, though, in any century, men and women have suffered, some fatally from want of the necessities of life and any sort of fair opportunity, and others grievously from want of soul. Discontent, hopelessness and anger predictably pervade the human condition and circumstance.
Of course, the feelings, thoughts and sensibilities that swamp or float our proverbial boat are pieces of our adaptive evolution. None of us escape the emotional pain and irresistible longings designed by nature to stimulate us to negotiate reality successfully as we face internal or external challenge.
Unlike animals in the jungle, though, we’re saddled with objectives, deadlines, responsibilities and hopes. We can’t just go for the kill when we’re confronted—though dog-eat-dog is an often-apt description of the marketplace. And our internal lives are just too unnerved, too impoverished, too anxious when we withhold ourselves from the sensitivity and connection desired by those in our private lives, and from the longing for intimacy built into our own natures. All of us, despite our genetic temperament, bad luck or the hard-knocks world we live in, must transcend or dissipate, in an acceptable way, the impulses and cognitive shocks that rock our stability.
I don’t think discontent and disappointment ever disappear entirely; as I said, it’s how we roll systemically. But most of us can learn to transcend it by autonomously directing our sentient gifts—a learnable skill that Don Draper and his colleagues at Sterling Cooper have not acquired. This poignant education provides the autonomous authority that underpins the experience of security; the emotional capital that helps us through fear, discouragement and loss; the on-our-toes mindfulness that shows up as resilience, timeliness and resourcefulness and the gravity of soul that is displayed by generosity, compassion and tolerance.
Arnold Siegel is the founder of Autonomy and Life and leader of its Retreat Workshops and Advanced Classes.