Month: February 2025

We came into this world with wonder. We don’t look at our exit with the same type of wonder. Because we are here now, and it is all we can see.

One approach:

Live as though you have three acts. That’s it. There is no need to speed through one to get to the next. Because one day, when the curtain calls, you can know you did it well. The best you knew how. (Fortunately, there was no right way.) Once we can accept that life is a play, we can be at peace. Once in peace, we can exit with the same grace that nature showed us to be here.

A promise communicates that you can trust me to follow through with whatever I am saying I will do. On the other hand, a threat is another promise, except there is a key difference with an implied form of violence. Where trust is diminished, we resort to threats.

Too often, we resort to using threats in the most important relationships. There isn’t much room for trust to grow when the relationship is in question. On top of that, it is difficult to walk away from some relationships. The relationship with a spouse, children, parents, and siblings differs from a bad boss and a dead-end job.

We further fracture and diminish what we imply in a threat when the other party understands and sees the track record. There’s a reason why we say an empty threat versus an empty promise. If one promise fails, you can make another. And yes, a series of failed promises can have consequences after a while. We can leave a hole. But not at the severity of empty threats where we actively tear down what trust is left.

All bark and no bite–empty threats are not a form of power. Ultimately, it is a symptom of a failing relationship. Instead of threatening, we can at least commit to promise to try again.

We think that means going to work and putting on our hats to play doctor, janitor, or accountant. We don’t say that I have to go to work as a human being. We are so much more than the narrow label of whatever we do from 9 to 5 for money.

Who we are doesn’t translate to what we do in the confines of our modern world. A carpenter over the ages might have done work in exchange for goods. But only recently have we forgotten how to put our personality into our work. It doesn’t meet the criteria to be the kind of person who produces something personal in a world that demands something ordinary.

Humans have this amazing ability to compartmentalize information so we can sort it. But it gets in the way when we want to find our identity. We are just too complex to simplify important things.

We spend so much time worrying about how to keep things from falling apart. The cycle of life, however, follows a rhythm. Things come together, and things come apart. Over and over again.

A star is born and then collapses. The forest grows until it burns, and the seeds sprout because of the high temperatures. All the cells in our body regenerate every seven years.

Our first impulse is to try to keep things together. When we invest in these outcomes, we can become disparaged when our world is free-falling. We spend an enormous amount of energy trying to avoid inevitable outcomes.

The trap is that we have convinced ourselves that we can tame our world. We can get to inbox zero or finish the work week and then start to live.

The alternative, then, is to learn to be comfortable in a world of chaos, where order is the exception.

Our imagination has no bounds. While we can walk a straight path, the mind will wander. In any direction, it so pleases. Impossible, it may be, to tame. Humans are so used to being on top of the food chain that it has made us believe that we can overcome the faults of the mind. But isn’t that what makes us human to begin with? We search for answers to conquer just like we did with animals, the environment, and elements. But the mind still alludes us. Some even say with the discovery of GLP1, someday we could even eliminate mental illness.

For now, let’s stick with what we have. Humans did not evolve to sit 8 hours a day typing TPS reports. They didn’t evolve for assembly line work. Suggesting the problem is for people to be better in a world where people are desperate. With a clear unequal distribution of resources, with everyone starting lines a bit different from the next, it feels insulting. Instead of applying more pressure, the answer could be, for now, to not let your imagination be crushed by the pressures of modern-day life.

Don’t try to picture everything that can go wrong and the worst possible outcomes. For some with the capabilities to read this blog, life isn’t so unbearable that it can’t be endured. These are the products of our times. And the products of our time, just 200 years ago, were different and arguably worse.

That doesn’t mean we don’t live in a dangerous world. Of course, it is dangerous. Our imaginations, however, tend to make it worse. Worrying about careers, social status, and our futures mismatches the operating system we use in prehistoric times. Capitalism and industrialism indeed push against our evolution and nature. This tug of war is why we are left exhausted. But more dangerous today? That’s a tough argument when we can point to many things that show it is better. Better today, and yes, it can be even better tomorrow.

The power of collective imagination, invisible forces that only exist in the ether, dictate so much of our lives. They don’t even breathe, but we know they exist. Anyone in debt can feel its presence even though it doesn’t have a heartbeat. The individual can feel powerless in these circumstances. Invisbile frces, however strong they may appear, are not invincible. We have mastered the idea of humans working together, to create something out of our imaginations, and head that direction.

What’s in jeopardy is more than just democracy or convenience or resource management, but the collective power of working together. It is one of the most essential human assets, yet it is in jeopardy in the name of profits, status, and ideological politics. We can try to send another rocket to space. But we miss that while we have mastered the external realm created only by imagination (shared and realized by those around us), the internal landscape remains a frontier that resists collective solutions and demands personal navigation. In other words, you have agency in all of this. You still choose the terms. You dream the dreams. And you decide which to follow, promote, and inspire others with.

The past doesn’t hold us, and neither does the future. We are here now. Including you. What are you going to do about it?

Relationships are highly defined today. You have a relationship with your spouse. A relationship with your kids. Your parents. Your friends. Extended family. Your boss. Your co-workers. Peers. Colleagues.

What we don’t think about is our relationship with ourselves. The relationship we have with the community. With the people we seek to serve. And then there are the relationships that distract us. We have a relationship with technology, social media, and the internet. There is a relationship we have with failure or victories. And let’s not forget the relationship we have with time. Since we as a culture have chosen to trade it as a commodity in exchange for pay, we now view time as something we are racing against. Ever balancing how much we give and how much we take. What we choose to pay attention to also says much about our relationships.

All these variables impact the depth of our connections with the world and the people around us. In the end, our personal relationship with the internal narrative also dictates how far we go with these relationships. In the story, we tell ourselves about being a hero, a protagonist, and a victim, and the people around us make such a profound impact.

The external is nowhere near as powerful as we give it credit for. It is our assessment of these forces that matter and that we can exercise some control. It’s a choice to delete social media and to take back time. It’s another to pick up the phone and reach out. And it is another to sit to the side, to choose to try again (or not and be at peace).

If we lived 10,000 years, we might feel closer to witnessing everything. But experiencing being scared, seeing something beautiful, or tasting something divine…well, we all have moments like these we can point to. 72 years, if we are lucky, is enough to experience the lifetime of 10,000 years. Its just set on repeat, but not anything new.

Better begs the question, “Compared to what?”

Better from when you started?

Better from last year?

Better since last month?

Better since yesterday?

That’s a interesting way to look at progress.

It’s better since yesterday squashes big leaps. (Small sample size.) As a result, you can only see marginal improvements. Baby steps that can’t be seen until all put together. But if the journey is overwhelming, we could ask if this went better than yesterday. And if not, how can it be better tomorrow? Not next year. Be present.

Chronic fatigue is something that persistently persists. And in a world of “connection,” the inbound doesn’t slow down. Because what capitalism does is extract. Extracting raw material, then money, then time, and now attention. However, the demand to scale attention hits the limits when all that is coming in is just noise. (Hang on, I just had another email come in.) It becomes easy to say to your team to put your head down and do the work. But when there aren’t enough hours in a day or showing no progress after putting in the time, we can all begin to understand why Newman from Seinfeld was always so cranky.

“Because the mail never stops Jerry.” — Newman

The more you get out, the more it just keeps coming in. We can point to the constant noise and interruptions coming in and say, “Do better.” But when will someone stop and say, “Turn the music down! I’m trying to get real work done around here.”

Facebook has been cautious not to add a thumbs-down button. You have to add an emoji in the comments. Reddit pushes the most popular comments to the top and the less popular ones to the bottom. But what we get confused about is how to dislike something. Disliking an idea doesn’t reflect the person who made the comment. It isn’t a judgment of character. However, how we have been conditioned to like something is equated to picking the person. Discourse has to evolve online. My prediction is it will continue to get worse before it gets better. However, every unpopular opinion cannot be an attack on a person. Safe spaces for dialogue are needed now more than ever.

In the end, most of what we read online is junk food. Content approval is not the same as a personal rejection, which will continue to be a barrier to meaningful conversation. At the same time, it says a lot about humans’ need to meet the approval of other humans—people like us.