Given the nature of my work, I have growing concerns about the surge in things that stop my clients from accessing their basic humanity. I’m seeing the same playing out in my friends, in my family, in myself, and every day I see wry memes on social media of people feeling like they’re losing precious parts of themselves…so it seems pretty widespread. There are tools available to us to shield and safeguard our humanity in an increasingly inhuman world, but we first need to acknowledge the problem, and we need to make time and invest energy into combating it. And while that might sound like another thing to add to your list alongside work, family commitments, staying healthy, getting enough rest and working on yourself…this actually becomes a way to step aside from the frenetic pantomime, to find some peace, to remember the wholesome things that lie behind the endless to-do list, and ultimately to recover a view of yourself where you’re not assessed by your performance, but simply by your capacity to be present, to connect deeply, to love and to let people hold you.
As the baseline for ‘normal’ shifts around us, and where the shift is gradual and unchallenged, it’s human nature to adapt ourselves to fit new situations. It’s often said that we are the sum of the 5 people we spend the most time with, but of course we’re also the product of our upbringing, of our culture, of the lifestyle and work that takes up so much of our time, of our habits, and of the influences that we allow to shape our thinking.
‘Normal’ has always drifted and changed, but it’s happening faster than ever before and it’s being guided by increasingly unsound hands. If I believed that there was some kind of global conspiracy to make us all unfocused, exhausted, afraid, emotionally unskilled and ethically adrift…I could at least find some respect for the conspirators, and there would at least be a distinct, singular enemy to fight. But I believe it’s more pernicious and much, much more stupid than that.
Humans are not machines, but it’s becoming normal to treat ourselves as machines whose worth is assessed by our efficiency, consistency and our ability to complete economically-valuable tasks. If we attempt to be conscientious, mature, restrained people who honour basic human traits such as emotional depth, sensitivity, making space for meaningful connection and moments of profound beauty, our needs for rest and play, our basic right to exist without proving ourselves to be worthy or productive, and all the other qualities of the human experience that aren’t supported by this urgent, oligarchical culture shift, we will probably be less effective and less competitive in our roles as productivity machines. This creates the fear that honouring our humanity will come at the price of our careers, our financial security, and therefore our ability to maintain safe lives for ourselves and our families. It becomes a race to sacrifice as much as we can for some sense of security.
As so many norms are trampled, as technology rewrites our mental and emotional responses, and as we are forced everyday to check our sense of reality, the remarkably adaptable human body is finally reaching its limits in being able to morph itself into what the world demands we be. We’re paying the price in subtle and obvious ways.
I want to be clear about my intention in this article. I will be exploring subtle, complex, multifaceted problems that no generation has faced before. We will, collectively and individually, develop ways to respond to all these memetic poisons, but that takes time, and the spread of the poisons is currently faster than our pace of understanding and adaptation.
Within the lag time between sensation, identification and adaptation, we find the gap into which our humanity is falling. So while I’m going to end this article with a whole load of advice and reflections and techniques that you might incorporate into your life, the real challenge is acknowledging the problems for what they are. If we don’t perceive the problems accurately, we won’t adapt, and as we’re left behind we’ll also carry the growing belief that we can’t adapt. You can. You will. I believe in your innate genius to meet these challenges and limit the harm they’re doing to you.
But unlike in other articles I’ve written where I describe a problem and then try to provide a clear, one-for-one solution, this article will focus more time on bringing the challenges into focus. Please then take my advice on board, but the best response here is to stay focused on what’s being done to you, day by day, and then as you notice what’s being done to you each day, you will naturally bring your conscious and unconscious problem-solving skills to bear.
We can only fix things that we’ve noticed and understood. So today, I want to bring your attention to the toxins, and then trust you to mop them up and transmute them in the way that works for you.
8 things that are trying to trash your humanity
Social Media 1: the ADHD-ification of the Human Brain
We aren’t diagnosing unprecedented numbers of people with ADHD because there’s suddenly a genetic shift in that direction. There is certainly more awareness of the realities of neurodiversity, which is fantastic, but another factor is that social media (and apps in general) encourage our neuroplastic brains to adapt in ways that look and feel like ADHD. Is your attention span shrinking? Are you feeling more mentally and physically jittery? Are you struggling to switch off? Do you find it harder to complete things? Is your impulse control shrinking? Do you reach for your phone without thinking, and even keep scrolling even as you say to yourself “I should stop scrolling”? Are you more emotionally erratic, more irritable and intolerant of discomfort? Do you have the simultaneous experiences of exhaustion and a high-energy compulsion to do more? Is your self-esteem, if not lower, then more inconsistent than it used to be, lurching between highs and lows depending on the influences on your life recently?
These are all the inevitable results of the way our brains engage with social media and modern apps. The actual building blocks are: rapid micro-decisions that never stop, because they’re endlessly served up by a highly efficient interface; lurching emotional responses; a sense of connection which isn’t real; the intentional manipulation of your dopamine responses to keep you engaged; seeing comments from people that enrage you (more on that below).
These things change you, and to imagine otherwise is dangerous. You are being changed. The answer isn’t, unfortunately, to throw your phone into the sea. As I mentioned above, you’ll be at an immediate disadvantage: you won’t have useful apps at your fingertips, you won’t be keeping up with trends, you probably won’t be able to do your job as well as you could.
What you, specifically, do about the way your brain is being reshaped by social media and modern apps will, I’m sorry to say, be unique to you. How much can you disengage? How clearly can you feel your brain being programmed as it’s happening? Do you have a support network and a local environment that can call you back to the full extent of who you are? In the last portion of this article I’ll cover some advice about approaches and techniques you might use but you will need to draw some clear boundaries for yourself here in order to protect your fundamental power to govern your mind, your feelings and your immediate responses to situations (which was something we always used to take for granted).
But at the very least, try to appreciate the degree to which you are being moulded and changed by the technology you use. Try be honest with yourself about it.
Social Media 2: The Comments Section
You may or may not dip into the comments section, but a lot of people do. I do. Because of things our brains naturally evolved to do around spotting threats, we are drawn to notice the people we don’t agree with, to flag the possible threat of conflict before it happens. For a lot of people, there’s also a compulsion to seek out certain posts because they’ll bring out worst people in the comments section, and then the next compulsion to dive into the comments for a good rage-out. You see people get into the worst arguments. You see the worst traits of humanity, from both sides of this comically polarised political landscape. You see people using the same arguments, the same copy-paste language, the same caustic and hurtful attacks. You see a progressively downward trend in empathy, kindness, and a willingness to reach for shared humanity.
First off, remember that a lot of these ‘people’ are bots. There’s no longer any reliable way to tell bots apart from people online, and it’s getting harder every day. Bots are good, these days, at acting and feeling like people. Their jobs will be manifold: some are used by the platform to drive engagement; some are part of massive corporate and governmental efforts to shift culture by exposing people over and over to ideas that evoke certain predictable emotional responses, thereby shifting their unconscious beliefs about the world over time; some are there to encourage us to visit a profile or a link to sell us a product or an idea.
So what does the comments section do to us? Remember that being changed by things like this happens unconsciously, slowly, progressively and is spoiled by your knowledge of what’s going on. So when I’m talking about their impact on you, I’m not saying you’ll know this is happening until much later. We’re trying to spot it happening in real time.
One of the themes of this article will be the diminishing of trust. Each time we read a comment by someone that confirms our worst fears about the state of the world, we go through a tiny shift in our underlying belief structure. In a tiny way, we look at the world with less trust. Later, I’ll speak more about what this does to us, but trust is absolutely fundamental to personal wellbeing, to social functioning and to the stability of a society.
Broadly, my advice is this: do not add to the comment section. If there ever was a time when it achieved anything, that time is long passed. Now, it just feeds the machine. The tech giants benefit from your engagement. Nobody else benefits. You aren’t waking anyone up, or convincing anyone, and doing it simply to meet your own need for expression will not bring you any lasting catharsis. You will not be seen or understood, you will not shift the dial, you just enter a shouting match with a bunch of bots, and I can’t see anything that you achieve by doing this.
Social media 3: Numbing everything else
But I think the most pernicious thing that social media is doing to us, is lowering our interest and care for anything that isn’t scrolling. That endless experience of micro-decisions; emotionally lurching in different directions; seeing (but never feeling) exotic and interesting places, ideas and people; being drip-fed curated moments; being endlessly stimulated; having a distorted, idealised version of the world served up to us whenever we reach for our phones…it’s doing things to our nervous systems and our bodies. The most important things in our lives are our connections and the moments of beauty that transport us out of the mundane and into the realisation of the precious wonder of the moment. Those experiences are just as available to us as they’ve ever been, but couples sit on the sofa and separately scroll on their phones, or we see the smiles of our children and we want to film and photo them, or we visit places that used to help us drop into ourselves, but now our hands fidget to our pockets to pull out the distraction box. Producers in Hollywood are telling writers to think in terms of ‘second screen viewing’ - that is, keeping plots simple enough that people on their phones, who only look up every now and then, can follow them. Even when we do experience a moment of true insight or wonder or delight, still it doesn’t give us the gut-punch it would once have. Now, it feels somehow remote and muffled. This is because our brains have learned to respond more strongly to the perfections or manipulations that social media shows us, than to the real world.
Surely one of the greatest goals of our lives, and one of the greatest challenges, is to learn to live while we’re alive. To actually be here, feeling the full impact of all that’s happening right now and all the implications and associations and memories and hopes that arrive to us in each and every moment that we continue to draw breath. I spend all of my days helping people to heal all the things that hold them back from this experience, and implicitly inviting them to remember that life is happening, that an infinite depth of wonder and terror and meaning is waiting for them all the time. Some of us reach those states from time to time. Some of us learn to live like that. But each thing that takes us away from the precious bounty of reality, is a terrible shame. For most of us that means childhood wounding or the warping of our perceptions by culture or defensive coping strategies that we’ve picked up along our lives. Those are very hard to shift, but we can do it.
And then, in our pockets, is a machine that drags us away from reality, and normalises the distortion, and actually numbs our ability to notice the moment when it’s happening. This is the ultimate tragedy and perhaps the ultimate crime behind the corruption of our humanity by our phones.
Where Are the Growups? The Prolification of Incompetence and Dark Triads in Positions of Leadership
People in positions of influence and power seem unable to rise to challenges of our time. We urgently need to address key issues in political trust, in crumbling infrastructure, in environmental damage and in the accumulation of wealth by the few, but those with the power to fix things seem either overwhelmed or are actively trying to make things worse. Whether we’re talking about current political leaders, or the faces we most often see on our TVs or phones, or those who own and run the platforms and systems that govern our daily lives, we see a proliferation of incompetence and bad-faith actors. If you’re unfamiliar with the term ‘Dark Triad’, it means the combination of psychopathy (the predating on other humans with no moral or empathetic limitations); narcissism (the absolute fixation on the self and on the betterment of the self); and machiavellianism (the strategic, careful manipulation of people and systems to attain power). Given time, and without sufficient conventions or structures in place to keep them in check, these people will always rise to positions of power and influence within groups.
I could easily go on a political rant here about how and why this has all happened, but to stop this article becoming a book I’ll just focus on what this reality is doing to our minds, hearts and choices…
Learned Helplessness
Our brains are constantly asking: “If I try to do things, do I see my efforts yielding results?” If we do, we get a boost to our sense of agency and we’re more inclined to try to do other things. If we don’t, we tend to stop trying. We become more risk-averse, we don’t believe in ourselves in the same way. This is called learned helplessness.
We can try to consciously and actively motivate ourselves, but over time if we see fewer wins coming from our hard work, this gets tougher. If you are left with the sense that untrustworthy people have more power over your life than you do, your brain will tend to surrender your sense of agency. You’ll get this sense that you’re powerless. This idea that we don’t have agency can be reinforced by all sorts of things: rising cost of living, being unable to access essential services, seeing repeating lessons on social media that terrible things are happening and there’s nothing you can do about it.
So we each need to watch for this sense of helplessness growing in ourselves, and take steps to combat it. Suggestions at the end of this article.
Psychopaths’ Disproportionate Affect on Trust
In a fascinating episode of The Great Simplification podcast (The Great Simplification), two leading psychologists explored the idea of what happens in groups when you introduce a psychopath. Because they don’t care about ethics or the wellbeing of others, a psychopath will model behaviour that causes everyone to question the basic foundations of our trust in others, trust that we all need to get through our lives. If you think about your basic beliefs around trust (can you basically trust the people you meet? Are people basically good? Can you rely on people to do what they say they’re going to? Are you safe in a group?), they’ll be complicated and nuanced, but you’ll have an underlying sense that either yes, people are basically good and trustworthy, or no, people are basically untrustworthy. It’s important for us to know we can trust: this is a fundamental underpinning of so many areas of our lives.
When you see people in a group, especially people who have power over your life, modelling behaviour that seems unbound by ethical standards, it shakes our sense of trust in general. With a lower background sense of trust, we tend to be more fearful, more socially withdrawn, less likely to take positive risks, and more likely to seek out a group that’s built around simplistic, shared beliefs (ideally beliefs that involve hostility towards others), because groups like this provide a measure of short-term reassurance and safety (see tribalism below). It just leads to a worse personal experience and a degrading society.
The left-versus-right fallacy
Somehow, this utterly stupid idea of right versus left has come to dominate our conversations and our identities. It isn’t just traditional differences, it’s pre-packaged sets of beliefs. It’s no longer ok to have complicated and nuanced views about the world, things that might lead to a conversation and learning if you got into a debate with a friend. Now, if you believe in social justice, you also have to buy into the idea that business is the enemy. If you believe that an incompetent government shouldn’t control your life, you also have to hate foreigners and believe in selfishness as a virtue. If you want to be a stay-at-home-mum, you also have to be a trad wife. If you’re worried about women having safe spaces in society, you need to brace for online abuse from blue-haired, aggressively woke idealists. If you’re a man into fitness, there’s a world of red-pill, alpha male, woman-hating misogynists who want to claim you.
The idea that there are extremists on the ‘other side’ and so we need to fight them…is really just a social media phenomenon. Outside of some rare personality types that tend to be extremists, most people are somewhere in a complicated, often confused middle-ground, and they’re often people you’d be able to have a good conversation with. But online, we fuel one another to take up more and more adversarial positions, until we actually become the problem. We end up arguing for things we never would have agreed to a few years ago, but we feel like we need to buy into a whole world-view in order to defend ourselves against those bastards on the other side.
The element of humanity that you’re at risk of losing, then, is your freedom to have complex perspectives that integrate all the things your lived experience, and instead having them replaced by simplistic collections of beliefs that the online world convinces you are more reliable.
Stay complex, stay curious, don’t let yourself be convinced that simplistic, righteous-seeming answers that give you answers to fire at “the other side” are better than sophisticated, nuanced thought.
Questioning Reality, and Reality-Based Tribalism
Let me ask you a question: should we vaccinate our children?
You will definitely have an answer to that, and you’ll have reasons to back up your answer. But how do you know? Who do you trust to educate you about this? Have you “done your own research”? If you did, did you bear in mind that google will usually only ever tell you things you want to hear, and that your entire online experience is curated to feed you things that agree with your preconceptions? Who did you decide to trust, in the end? What were their motives in telling you that information?
Not long ago, there was lively, enthusiastic debate about all sorts of topics, but we all fundamentally agreed on the nature of reality. Now, you have to be either somebody who is happy with very simplistic answers, or you have to be very confident about your knowledge and education…because if you’re anywhere in the middle you’re going to be regularly challenged to question some fundamental foundations of your reality. Bots are trying to manipulate you, people are lying or stating totally ridiculous positions with great confidence, there is really no way to tell apart an expert in their field from a confident liar or from purely ai-generated content. We are sliding into a world of ai-slop and a soup of meaning.
Kids today are being educated in how to filter their experiences online, so they have some defence against the slop. Millennials have varying levels of knowledge and defence against it. Older generations, sadly, seem to be all-too-easily manipulated and seduced by algorithms, ai videos and professional influencers.
Except of course, all the traditional ways of knowing the shape of reality still exist. Real education establishments still exist. Real books still exist. It’s up to us to detach from the slop train and recommit to some proper avenues of learning.
The Unfairness of Living Through Oligarchy
The philosopher Polybius (c. 200–118 BCE) wrote about the phases that government goes through. He said that there are three forms of ‘good’ government, and each decays into a ‘corrupt’ form, giving us six phases of government. In Polybius’ model, we start with a virtuous form of monarchy, which decays into tyranny, which is overthrown by the aristocracy who are trying to restore justice and balance, but this decays into oligarchy where the ruling class horde wealth and power and oppress the lower classes, but this will inevitably lead to a popular uprising and the formation of a democracy, until at last this collapses into mob rule under demagogues and manipulative leaders.
I’m not here to sell you Polybius’ view on politics and virtue, but we’re certainly watching history being made, at high speed, every day. There’s a rapid shifting in the baseline of wealth distribution, social mobility, the perception of trust, and the influence of patently immoral people. All the post-war elements of the social contract are being dismantled and poisoned by the rich, the influential, by private equity and by corporate structures meant to short-circuit temperance and prudence, with the ultimate goals of concentrating wealth in the hands of the few.
For decades, indeed for the whole lifetimes of everyone reading this article, we have been protected from predatory and selfish interests by laws, conventions, by our governments, by the simple fact that when people feel relatively prosperous, they’re pretty happy to follow along with the way things are headed.
Where are the moral leaders? Where is the notion that justice applies equally to the rich and the poor? Where is the aspiration for everyone to have equal access to education, opportunity, justice, healthcare and a good quality of life?
It is hard to live in an era of decay and unravelling. It is hard to watch the triumph of the morally bankrupt over those trying to be good. I’ll offer some advice below on how to handle this.
The Metacrisis Marches Closer
I was sitting in a cafe recently and a couple of concerned mums were talking about the struggles their kids were facing at school, particularly the impact of social media and technology, and the number of predatory viewpoints that wanted to snare their vulnerable young minds. Andrew Tate was mentioned. They talked about how everyone is being diagnosed with ADHD. One of them was struggling to remember the name of a book to recommend for their friend, so I chimed in and said “Stolen Focus?”. “That’s it!” she said, and I joined them for a little bit of their chat before exiting and leaving them to their conversation.
But one thing I did add was “you have to also remember that your children are growing up with the belief that there is no future”.
(What does the word Metacrisis mean? See this short post on my Substack)
For the whole of my adult life, I have been baffled, struggling, raging, pleading, and attempting to educate those around me because so many people just seem to want to focus on their immediate lives while we all know the world is dying. You might manage to pay your bills this month, but if we aren’t all working towards the safety of the planet then what’s the point? Like other ‘activists’, my experience has mostly been watching my pleas fall on deaf ears, and I do understand why. But this, ultimately, will prove to be the undoing of our version of civilization: we simply can’t think long-term, and we can’t embrace prudence, responsibility and temperance as social virtues.
But it’s getting closer, it’s popping up in every sphere of our lives, and it’s becoming harder to ignore every day.
There is no playbook for how to live through the Metacrisis, outside of a few pockets of expertise (details on that below). How do we handle our emotional fallout, watching what’s happening? How can we plan for the future? How do we keep going to work, knowing what we know? How should we raise our kids in this era?
This is truly the ultimate use of the word ‘unprecedented’. It’s important to remember that you are living through something you weren’t raised to understand or prepare for. We need to go looking answers, guidance and help.
Advice for staying human
Remember: you are a Creature, not a Machine
At the heart of all of this subject, and at the root of all of my concerns above, is the conditioning we receive, through the language we hear, the repeated mental habits that apps force us to adopt, and the shape of the world as it changes around us, to consider ourselves to be machines. Machines have value because of their capacity to fulfill objectives, and so we learn that human value comes from meeting targets. Accumulate wealth, achieve status, own certain things, have a certain level of knowledge or education, look a certain way, make people happy and pleased with us, have a certain body fat percentage.
You are not a machine. You have value just as you are, and what matters most is your ability to be intensely present in the precious moment that is happening to you right now. Beyond that is finding your place in the web of life: building relationships and meaningful, soulful connections with other human beings; knowing where you belong in the world; knowing that your life is in service to the human and non-human lives around you.
You are a creature. You feel. You notice. You breathe, and stretch, and celebrate, and hurt. You are sensation and identity and will. It matters very much that you are here, as a creature, and not lost in a delusion of being a machine. We hurt ourselves and everyone around us when we collapse our multitudes into the cold, KPI-driven metrics of the machine.
The ways in which you remember that you are a creature will be unique to you, but I wanted to begin by reminding you of this one important truth. Find your ways to return back to your creature-ness.
Firm rules for screen time
Ok this one is obvious and you knew it was coming.
Your phone has been designed to be addictive. You need to think of it the same way you’d think of anything else that people have peddled to keep addicted punters coming back for more.
Primarily: decide on your rules and stick to them. Small quantities of social media time can actually be the worst option, because you’re keeping the addiction alive while also starving your brain of the thing it’s learned to crave.
Here’s the best solution I’ve found for myself:
Be very honest with yourself about your current level of addiction, screen time, and the manipulation and numbing of your emotional and mental responses. If you find yourself reaching for your phone when you haven’t looked at it in a while, you’ve gone too deep into addiction.
When you acknowledge that it’s gone too far, go cold turkey. Most of us need our phones to live our lives and do our jobs, so just uninstall the apps that are causing you issues. Stay off them for a minimum of a week. Over time you’ll notice yourself beginning to feel like a human being again. Also give yourself non-phone days, where you leave your phone in a box or a drawer and live a day without it.
When you’re sure it’s safe, re-introduce the apps, but keep your use of them within controlled windows of time. For instance, I tend to install them on a Friday night and uninstall them on a Sunday night.
And for me, it’s a loop. Recognise I have a problem, deal with the problem, and then over time the problem creeps back in. If you can live off a dumb phone, and if you’re happy doing so, do that. If you must be connected, or if you want to be, then I’m afraid you need to accept that your brain runs on predictable chemistry, and that little box in your hands was designed to hack the chemistry of your brain. You don’t get to opt out of the addictive nature of it - it will always be haardous, so treat it as such.
Fight for the place of connection and beauty in your life
Decide what matters most to you, and ensure that a lot of your time and energy is directed to those things. And I can tell you that at the heart of the human experience are the needs for connection of moments of beauty (and by beauty, I mean experiences that elevate you out of the mundane and into moments that feel special and sacred. This could be staring into the eyes of someone you love, or strolling through nature, or witnessing great art, or losing yourself in music, or engaging in a hobby or craft that means the world to you).
Emotional reality-checks
This is becoming one of the exercises I most often set for my clients:
Get a copy of Karla McLaren’s Emotional Vocabulary Checklist
Set aside time for this exercise, ideally as part of a regular habit. 20 minutes is good.
Scan through the vocab list and look for words that jump out at you, which might be telling you that this emotion is currently present for you and trying to speak to you.
Take some time to close your eyes, breathe, and try to connect with this emotion. We are not seeking to do anything about it, simply to honour it and try to listen to what it’s telling us. You ability to understand the wisdom contained in each emotion will grow over time, so just begin by looking for the feeling. This will have a place in your body, and the emotion itself will feel a certain way that isn’t physical. Just be with this feeling for a while. We are so easily taught and tempted to rush on from emotions, to ignore them where possible and to hurry them along if we do need to acknowledge them. So take this time to be with this one feeling.
Come back to centre, maybe open your eyes and look around and feel the weight of your body on the support underneath you. Then look at the sheet again and pick the next emotion that jumps out at you. Connect with this one.
Do this until your time is up.
Also, try not notice over time whether certain feelings never feel right for you. Are there certain feelings you’re avoiding?
Being a creature means having emotions. Connecting in this way will strengthen your connection with your emotions so you can be more present with the during your day. If you want to dive more deeply into this book, Karla has recently released a new edition of The Language of Emotions.
Remember your context and give yourself grace
It’s ok, indeed it’s vital, to occasionally acknowledge that things are harder for us than they have been for others, and to give ourselves grace and compassion when things don’t move as easily, when we don’t have all the things we expected to have, when we feel exhausted as we watch evil men get another win.
I’m not advocating a victim mindset or giving up, not at all. If you’ve read my other work or had some coaching with me you’ll know that a thread of passionate, kick-ass agency is woven through the very heart of my philosophy. Rather, I’m talking about acknowledging that the game is rigged, and it’s skewed against people who want to live good, positive, wholesome lives. Try to remember this from time to time, try to forgive yourself for this being so hard, and try to incorporate it into your planning and decision-making.
Get better at asking for help
It’s universally acknowledged, in all places where wise people are offering guidance in living through this time, that we cannot do this alone. It is too much, and it’s just dumb to try to be an island of independence in a time like this. You won’t be as resilient, you won’t learn the lessons that will get you through, you won’t be both held and challenged in all the ways you need to be.
Help might mean asking your partner or friend to listen to you rant for a while, and not interrupt, and not try to offer solutions that just make the feeling go away for a short time.
Help might look like reading books, following social media accounts or listening to podcasts that help you understand what’s going on and find solutions that work for you. There’s a page on my website with some resources to get you started. And I wrote my core trilogy to give everyone a shared understanding of the core things that bring is deep happiness, fulfilment and wellbeing.
I recommend that everyone should do some training in The Work that Reconnects, because it was designed to help us understand and navigate what’s going on.
Help will absolutely demand that you confront your need for community. This can feel like an overwhelming challenge in a time of radical individuality - it can feel like you’ve failed to cope on your own; it can feel like something that nobody else seems to want; it can feel like you don’t have the skills to begin. I’m currently reading Think Like A Commoner, and I’m finding it very helpful for shifting my thinking and re-equipping lost skills. But in general, community begins when we reach out to one another and try to find common ground. How might you do this?
And yes, help might mean speaking to a therapist or coach. I am finding that more and more often, alongside the challenges that my clients bring, we are exploring how to handle the dehumanizing shape of the modern world.
But we’re talking about help to keep your true humanity alive as our world becomes more inhuman, and sometimes that’s very simple. Random acts of kindness. Thanking people more often and with more intention. Doing small favours and acts of service for people. Checking on your neighbours. Making somebody laugh. Letting somebody see you cry. Sitting with your back against a tree and asking for help in remembering who you are.
Help can take many forms.
Keep your anger and rage alive.
Finally, as much as I hope everyone looks after themselves and learns to meet their emotional and situational needs…don’t let your soothing take away your rage at what’s happening. There is a call to action for all of us, to whatever extent is possible for each person, to resist the slide into dysfunction, slop, injustice and trustlessness that is permeating our world. We were raised to expect someone else to fight this fight for us. For the longest time, we thought the fight against prejudice, injustice and predatory capitalism was actually won! It wasn’t. We were just sheltered from its presence by privilege, comfort and a uniquely stable period of history brought about by the flood of cheap fossil fuel energy. Reality is biting back, and it’s reminding us that evil must always be resisted. If you work so hard to calm your emotional turbulence that you disengage your political and justice-based instincts, you have again surrendered your humanity.