To find our way back to those parts of us that get buried beneath the world and all the other people within it, we need to lay bare whatâs causing so many of us to get lost in the first place. Because this mass losing of self, this epidemic of alienation, isnât happening by accident. Itâs the inevitable outcome of a system actively designed to separate you from you.
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2. WHERE DID THE LOVE GO?
âAt work, according to the most recent data, less than 16 percent of us are fully engaged, with the rest of us just selling our time and our talent and getting compensated for our trouble. In the worst extremes of always-on, high-stress jobs, such as distribution centers, emergency room nursing, and teaching, incidences of PTSD are higher than they are for veterans returning from war zones. Imagine that. Weâve created work conditions that are so blind to the needs of each human being that they wind up experiencing more soul-destroying distress than soldiers whoâve witnessed the killing and harming of other human beings.
None of the above has anything to do with who you are on the inside. The uniqueness of what you love or loathe is beside the point. Instead, you areâfrom school on into the world of workâassessed against a set of models. You are judged not by how intelligently youâve cultivated your unique loves, but by how closely youâve matched the models. So, in truth, you wonât just get lost. Youâll get hiddenâand by the very institutions that are supposed to reveal you. Little wonder weâre facing such an epidemic of lost people.
The idea of roots setting a person free is counterintuitive, but deracination from the past, from land, from family, from mothers, makes for an unstable present. We must have, or we will always search for, a place to bury our bones.
Tracing forward from these remembrances of things past gives us the chance to re-experience and reframe these beliefs. Doing so liberates us from the confounding forces we label as fate, destiny, orâeven more frequentlyâthe other personâs âfault.â We will never sort through them all, of course, but what we donât sort through impedes our happiness. It tricks us into using the rest of our livesâand the people we love, the professions we choose, the organizations we leadâto try to close the gaping wounds from childhood.
The pain of hating our own creation is a consequence of our investing too much of our sense of being into the company, the product, the creation. When we hang our sense of self on the whisper of an idea; when we unwittingly insist that our love, safety, and belonging depend on what we do and, most important, how others feel about our feelings, our actions, and our work; then we leave little space for anything other than bitter, existential suffering.