Make Humanity Great Again

“No man is an island” so John Donne says, yet we seem determined to make a global archipelago of individuality and isolation. Such remoteness is often touted as boundaries or nervous system regulation yet overlooks the way it perpetuates distrust, loneliness, and division. In my humble opinion, it is the antithesis of what is needed right now.

There is a lot going on in the world and it all feels scary, perpetual, and insurmountable. I am hearing this from a lot of my clients, friends, family, and feeling it myself. Thanks to social media and the news, our exposure to this stuff is 24/7, and managing this can be tough given how attached we all are to our devices. But add to that the way these platforms are designed to both engage and enrage; fostering echo chambers that keep us locked into our views with no consequences or change coming from the interactions we have online.

How easy it is for us to swear, abuse, mock, block, and contribute to the divide that is growing in our global community.  Do you feel good seeing these interactions take place in a comment section? Even those who are out to perpetuate the divide – even when they perceive it to be a good on their part (protecting, maintaining their way of life or loved ones) – do so often out of fear. Fear that their comfortability and life may be changed. Fear rarely feels good; it’s not supposed to. But instead of looking for a different way to assuage our fears of change or FOLO (fear of losing out), we further isolate, we further hate with assumptions and generalisations, we become more aggressive, making little effort to connection, reflect, or take accountability for ourselves.  

So, we fight on the internet because we don’t have to change things that are working for us and we can’t be touched from beyond the keyboard. We swear and throw crude hand gestures when we make a mistake and are called out for it because we just cannot be wrong. We cry “woke” when we’re asked to think about the inequity being created by systems because, God forbid, we acknowledge the system doesn’t work for everyone.  We assume that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, without considering that the goose is just one animal on the farm. We don’t seem to care about the impact we have on others anymore. This very idea that “I must protect me and mine at all costs” that has killed community, suffocated empathy, and erased any accountability for impact we have on others. We have become tit-for-tat in our emotional investment for almost everything. Closing our worlds off to anyone or anything that makes us feel the slightest bit uncomfortable or negative.

Such cordoning of ourselves is done under the guise of protecting our peace, our boundaries, our rights. All very important and necessary things to protect, but people often forget that there are two sides to that coin. We sometimes have to be disrupted. We sometimes do owe people things. When we yell “my rights” we must also consider “my responsibilities”. That’s the part people conveniently forget. You cannot have rights without responsibilities. You want the right to clean drinking water; you have the responsibility to protect shared resources and keep the environment healthy. You want the right to free speech; you have the responsibility to not incite harm and reckon with the impact words have. You want to benefit from society; you must contribute to its maintenance as best you can. You want to the right to hold and opinion; you have the responsibility to update it when new information is presented. You want the right to religious freedom; you have the responsibility to allow other to coexist without erasure. Hopefully you get my point now.

These are uncomfortable points to consider, and I encourage you to resist the urge to go “yes, but what about…”. Just stop for a moment and consider your impact, the impact of what you say and do. Would you feel comfortable with someone else doing and saying those things to you? My relationship with religion is murky but to the best of my knowledge, the homeboy Jesus preached a similar idea: “Do to others as you would have them do to you”. I’m not a smart man, Jenny, but I’m gonna take a stab and assume he meant that to include everyone, not just those you like.

There is so much evidence from economics, sociology, evolution, psychology, and general common sense to suggest that we just do better when we are positively connected to each other. We are designed to be together; we do better when we consider things outside ourselves. This is not just sharing in the good stuff. We must also seek to share our burdens, lightening the load for all. Sometimes this may require us to act against our individual best interests and take one for the team. But if this is the attitude of everyone, you’ll also receive when you need it. Rights AND responsibilities for everyone, remember?

Accountability incites change and is thus ongoing, empathy is a perishable skill, and community is a resource that needs ongoing maintenance; we don’t ‘achieve’ them and move on. But we seem to be in this interminable negative loop of neither receiving nor giving empathy. Nor do we have the energy to engage in connection, but we are also not gaining the energy benefits of connection. We straight up appear to have lost the ability to take accountability because it makes us feel bad, so then we don’t change. So, what the fuck do we do? Well, my idea is to do the things anyway. Take accountability for ourselves and our impact, show each other empathy, and create a community that we can rely upon. Do these things even if we feel like we aren’t going to get what we want or that we might lose out on getting ahead.

I am not so naïve to believe that there are no bad people in the world. Not so naïve to think that absolutely everyone has good intentions. Nor so naïve to think that there aren’t going to be people who try to game the system. Of course not. In my job I hear multiple times a day the damage that another human can inflict on their fellow beings. I’m exhausted from clients coming into my office wanting to find ways to feel better from an issue that requires other people and systems to change. You cannot out-therapy systems and societies designed to dysregulate and divide. We must work as a collective to shift our attitudes so that those who are blinded by their FOLO have less of an opportunity to take advantage.

This is my plea: Upgrade your low expectations of how we should behave towards each other. Be ready to sit with things that make us uncomfortable or be okay with being wrong but be open to change. Ask for change or send feedback rooted in kindness and the benefit of the doubt. Seek out better connections, take them offline, meet people with openness and curiosity instead of assumptions and suspicion. Just be kind. While all this look easy, the reality is it is hard because you are butting against a system that thrives of isolation and individualisation. But the alternative is harder and much more detrimental to our health and happiness.  

“We must love one another, or die” – W.H. Auden 1939.