Traction

Traction and where to reliably find it nowadays is much on my mind. In a world awash in information, blog posts, videos, video reels, and ad infinitum, how do we make the best and most informed choices now? Everyone has an opinion. they swear is the right one to follow. Everyone presents as an expert on something.

What should we read? What to listen to? What sources can we trust? Where do we find time to do anything, above and beyond what HAS to be done daily? How do we identify our gifts and what we are passionate enough about to invest our lives in? Even worse, how do we decide what is real and reliable?

This is not an exclusive problem for us in society today. But the complexity has definitely been ramped up. Ease of access to seemingly endless options on the internet seems to create illusions and false impressions. If everyone is led to believe they can (and should) become a millionaire before they are 30, it is frustrating and could be soul-crushing if you don’t reach that target milestone. It has the potential to imbue young people with a feeling of dissatisfaction about missing the boat. Widespread FOMO.

“Fear of missing out” is a real issue for many younger people and even mid-career professionals. They are putting off marriage and house buying and baby-making in greater numbers than their parents and grandparents. There is a burgeoning revival of all things retro. There is increasing comfort in looking backward rather than looking forward. Not because life is perceived to have been so great in the past, but because it is now so difficult to imagine what can be relied on in the future.

Teenage suicide is occurring at an alarmingly high level. Teenagers! Once marked by largely carefree days under their parents’ wing, it was expected to be a time devoted to seeding dreams, testing out love and sexuality, and taking part in the normal rites of passage in the childhood to adulthood transition. That so many precious young people are opting to get off the merry-go-round of life before it even starts should be an alarming wake-up call that our values are wildly out of whack.

I often wonder how character is being built in young people today. Our great-grandparents cut their teeth on life’s harshest realities. The need to survive trumped most other considerations. Our ancestors knew that if the cows weren’t milked, the eggs collected or the fields tilled, they weren’t eating. Back-breaking work to be sure but also the satisfaction of knowing that your fate largely rested in your own hands and on your own efforts.

In smaller, rural societies, everyone knew everyone else. There was a sense of belonging and community. And not online communities. But real communities with real people who baked real apple pies and built things with their own hands and met up in a sanctuary every week, for social reasons as much as for spiritual ones. I would argue the two are inextricably connected anyway.

I would argue that our social policies need to recapture the most positive elements of those times. Humans need each other. Somehow that message is being lost in the wake of new technological promise, widespread social fragmentation, and the breakdown of social cohesion.

Young people need to be protected and nurtured until they are strong enough to grow and survive on their own. They need a base on which to build and find the traction they need to propel them forward into their lives. Mass killings and rising suicide rates are dark proof that young people are being widely failed in that regard.

The pendulum of extremes in most eras eventually swings back to a more balanced and reasonable life-enhancing way of doing life. In today’s wildly fragmented environment, it is hard to see how a newly emerging society will find time to gestate and emerge with so many options to choose from. Social cohesion has largely evaporated.

Yet time and space for self-reflection and inner exploration are badly needed on a wide scale. That need makes sense of the abundant and divergent offerings of healing retreats and therapies. We all know we need help.

The availability of healing options is more a band-aid than a cure. Our society needs to move back to putting individuals at the center of our society again. Survival instincts must kick in as people feel the essence of what makes them human being eroded.

It may be time for a resurgence of the famous line that became a war cry for humanity in the 1976 movie Network. “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.” Maybe when that war cry is expressed by enough people across society again, there could be a genuine shift towards leading a more collectively saner and equanimous life.