The world feels broken.
Too many people seem to be disconnected from what truly matters. Neighbors mistrust or even just dislike their neighbors. Meaningful and productive dialog about important matters between people who hold differing views …. well, that seldom happens. It’s brittle. Push too hard on any source of conflict or dissonance, including with those we ought to be closest too, and it just seems like stuff is gonna break. There’s no resilience, no “give” in our way of being in the world. It feels like something has changed. Not just changed, but changed for the worse.
The world feels broken.
I feel that way myself too much of the time. You too?
Too many of us spend our days doing the same things we’ve always done, and we go about that routine without really having a clear understanding of the “why” behind our daily grinds. It’s not that there is no meaning to be found. There certainly is. But even when things are good, even if we are fortunate enough to have found love and centeredness and balance in our own individual or family lives … there is a strong sense that the world around us is reeling out of control. No? Surely you feel it too.
I’m talking about the big-picture here.
It feels like too often we search for “meaning” in the wrong things. Too often we measure success or happiness using a flawed metric.
Some of the best minds of our generation are spending their days trying to perfect methods of getting people to click ads. Some of them are paid extremely well for it.
What if we paid them to grapple with the issues around enlarging people’s lives? What if the value we assigned to their work came not from their ability to add to the wealth of companies or the billionaire CEO’s that employ them, but from their ability to add to the well-being of our society?
What if rather than click-throughs, they were charged instead with finding ways to eliminate poverty and hunger? What if we tasked them with creating actionable campaigns to seriously address the biggest issues of the day. Protecting our environment. Empowering the marginalized. Reinventing our flawed educational system.
What if we decided collectively that our greatest gift to the planet, to the future, to our children … would be if we learned to take seriously the self-inflicted problems we have created through the decades of our unsustainable way of living in and on this world, and learned to not only START the process of reversing those trends, but to accelerate that reversal?
We will not do this in a grand, sweeping, easily implemented “solution” that fixes everything. Not with an “aha moment” kind of solution that changes the planet and our society overnight. Certainly no such solution exists.
But changing course and making a serious effort to head-off the enormous problems we WILL see in OUR lifetimes in the near future is do-able. Not easy. But do-able.
Whatever that looks like, it starts with each of us.
What is it that you think would be an antidote to the malaise? Being more content? Balance? Happiness? How do you think we get there? None of these things are conditions for the future …. That is, none of these depend upon external factors. “If only *this* would happen, I would be happy!” “If only I didn’t have to worry about *that*, I could find contentment” “If only I didn’t have so many competing priorities, I could feel more balanced.”. If only. That’s a flawed way of looking at the world, but it’s a trap into which we ALL fall from time to time.
Rather … Happiness, Contentment …. ALL those things are attitudes for the present. They are decisions that each of us make, each morning as we face the world. Today I will live THIS way. 
With practice, we get better at it. What helps with that practice is to choose to be the kind of person who looks for the good, celebrates the ordinary moments, and practices gratitude. Every day. So notice the good. Be joyful in ordinary moments. Speak your gratitude out loud, or write it down. These are not radical ideas. But they are practices we all struggle with.
We can’t accomplish our “wildest dreams”, unless we dare to have some pretty wild dreams in the first place. What if our wildest dream was a kinder world, where poverty and hunger did not exist? What if our wildest dream was that each of us celebrated nature, worked to protect the planet, and practiced living gently upon this earth? What if our wildest dream was that our truest work was to connect with the best part of ourselves, to give that part voice and the empowerment to act from those impulses. Every day. In every situation. That’s a pretty wild set of dreams.
Historian Rutger Bregman, in his excellent TED Talk entitled, “Poverty isn’t a lack of character, it’s a lack of cash”, says that:
“If history teaches us anything, it’s that there is nothing inevitable about the way we have structured our society and our economy right now. Ideas can and do change the world. And particularly in the past few years, it has become abundantly clear that we cannot indefinitely maintain the status quo. That we need new ideas. ….. It’s not enough to know what we’re against. We also need to be FOR something. Martin Luther King didn’t say, ‘I have a nightmare’. He had a dream! So here’s MY dream. I believe in a future where the value of your work is not determined by the size of your paycheck. It’s determined by the amount of happiness you spread, and the amount of meaning you give. I believe in a future where the point of education is not to prepare you for another useless job, but to prepare you for a life well-lived.“
What if we could break the cycle of mindless consumption? What if we challenged ourselves to push the boundary a little each day on living more centered and engaged lives? Lives more engaged in enlarging the lives of those around us? Lives based on kindness, and giving, and compassion, and actually DOING what’s right, right here we we are. What if we spent less time doomscrolling, and more time out in nature? What if we each took time each day to read things that lift us up, that fill our souls to the brim and even to overflowing, with love and concern for each other?
What if we ALL felt, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr challenged us, to feel the Fierce Urgency of Now?
What if more people believed with certainty in their hearts and minds that THIS age we live in must be different?
What if each of us came to truly believe that by MY voice and actions, I could BE that difference? What if YOU believed that?
What if we actually ELECTED more people to public office who gave a rat’s ass about making the world a better place for ALL of us?
And most especially, what if we put some of those brightest minds to work, not trying to increase the click-through count, but for the PURPOSE of finding a way to instill a collective mindset that YES, we CAN do better, live better, more responsibly and more holistically? And in the process we can actually change the course of history.
In his book, “Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the Second Half of the Journey”, James Hollis says that “Our souls are calling us to an appointment with life.”
What he’s saying is that we ALL have to ask ourselves, “Why am I here? And in service to what?” The problem is that the world stands ready with ALL kinds of bogus answers to these questions, and the circumstances of our individual lives can easily lead us down false paths that do not serve to help us each answer those questions authentically.
Seth Godin says the most effective marketing ALWAYS distills down to a simple seven-word message. “People like us do things like this.”
While I believe he’s spot-on with that statement, there are two BIG problems with this when you try to apply it to “How do we change the world?” If we were, say, (as marketers) to try to develop some sort of campaign to actually change the world.
The first problem is deciding that in our campaign, we can’t work to a “normal” sort of scale. Because“us” means ALL of us. It has to. It has to. All means all. And there simply is no “bully pulpit” to reach and persuade ALL of us at once. So we each have to do whatever we can individually, and to spread it to the best of our own ability, within the bounds of whatever our own scope of influence allows. And trust that it will catch on, and scale.
And the second problem is deciding that “things like this” should NOT just be about getting in on the next trendy piece of detritus. “Things like this” means enlarging the lives of others. It means being kind. It means looking out for others, and taking small, ordinary moments to live connected lives.
It means choosing to become an unstoppable conduit of love to the world.
“Things like this” means realizing deep inside that we … that YOU … have a tangible and actionable responsibility to both those around us and to the future.
Let THAT be your very reason for being.
The enormity of the task ahead … the task of challenging EACH of us to create better, richer, fuller lives; and thereby, in the process creating a better world … cannot be under stated. 
I’d like to believe we can do it. Not in spite of its difficulty. But rather, BECAUSE of its difficulty. We are people who rise to the challenge. We sometimes forget that. We forget that we CAN impact change. History has shown the opposite. And it has shown that when we are motivated by fealty to the common good, that power is at its highest potential.
It’s not about rainbows and unicorns and tripping tra-la-la through a wildflower covered meadow with all of us joining hands to sing “kum-ba-yah”, and feeling self-satisfied, patting ourselves on the back about how “woke” we are to the problems around us. Rather, it is about the hard decision to do better. (each day) To feel better. (each day). And to live better, more responsible and authentic lives, and to know that by doing so we do change the world.
Again, Dr. King …. He believed that “The Time Is Always Right To Do What Is Right”.
On February 6, 1968 in his speech in Washington, D.C., “A Proper Sense of Priorities”, Dr. King concluded with a poignant observation:
“On some positions Cowardice asks, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks, ‘Is it politic?’ Vanity asks, ‘Is it popular?’ But conscience asks, ‘Is it right?’”
And there comes a time when we must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right.”
So again … what if we engaged the best minds of our generation in finding ways to convince us that EACH of us can make better choices about how to positively impact the world within our own reach? No matter how big or small that reach might happen to be. What if they grappled with ways of motivating each of us to choose to live richer, fuller, more balanced lives?
What if the world wasn’t broken?
What if we just needed to be better, act better, and live better lives? What if the responsibility of knowing that and working for that was up to me? And what if it was up to you?
It is.
love,
John