The world is at a critical crossroads right now with various crises including climate change, ecological destruction, species decline, animal population decline, widening political gaps and a lack of shared sense of reality among political parties. We have unsustainable resource consumption, an impending energy crisis with major financial ramifications, possibility of nuclear warfare, rising suicide rates and poor mental health, ocean acidification, river and environmental toxification from pollution and unsustainable agriculture, to name only those that come to my mind. The collection of our global challenges is now known as the Meta-Crisis.
So what should we do about all of this?
In a sense, nothing.
Goals and initiatives focused on fixing “problems” out of disgust or panic, even when well-intentioned, are narrow and rigid in their approach. Systems theory tells us that most manipulations made to a complex system (like our own lives or our society) will rarely, if ever, match their intended outcomes, and often backfire to create harm, tension and conflict.
Passion is a person’s love for- and connection to- life, channeled into specific areas leading to action, exploration and understanding. To live by our passions means to forget fear and not act from it any longer. Passionate action comes naturally when we are not demanding outcomes from the world, but are creating from felt inspiration. Passion does not focus on problems but on creating something beautiful, and sharing, which is fundamentally a different attitude.
Sharing, by its nature does not demand that what it is offering be accepted and implemented or that anyone else or anything else change. Rather, it creates and gives because it feels good and right to do so, and that is enough. Counterintuitively, this is much more effective at inspiring the types of changes we desire in the face of our own and society’s current trajectory. A person focusing on the joys of their passion and simultaneously aware of the reality of the circumstances at hand is a much more effective agent of change than someone focusing on the “problems” they perceive and trying to fix them via a reactionary, forceful approach. Passion does prompt manipulations to a system, but they tend to be gentle, considerate and work with the flow of the system. The results tend to be transformative, helping the system evolve into its healthiest manifestations. Egoic, reactionary manipulations tend to be forceful, with strong attachments and emotionality, and eventually damage the system or generate harmful externalities that ruin the environment that the system exists in, which in turn harms or destroys the system itself.
It is fortunate that we don’t actually need to know the answers before making improvements, because the improvements start with each of us being more like ourselves and engaging in what truly lights us up without attachment to any outcome. This is not a chore, but a rewarding and intrinsically inspired way of being that can make sense to everyone with the right guidance.
As more and more of us consistently act from passion, our talents will synergize and support each other’s, each of our talents becoming more useful by combination with others’ talents and contributions, and thus begins a virtuous spiral that keeps expanding upward and outward to create a blossoming world.