Fiddling with Ourselves While the World Burns

Our focus on inner work and wellbeing is going too far

Something I’m Learning

(Sorry, dear readers, this is a long one! Grab a drink, and let’s dive in.)

Part 1: On trendiness in social impact

I’ve been in the social impact industry for nearly 25 years now, long enough to notice trends across the years. Periods of time (say, 5 years) where a certain topic becomes fashionable and rakes in funding, news, awards, TED talks, new university certificates, and so on – at the expense of other essential topics. One of the justifiable critiques of philanthropy is that every few years funders change what they’re most excited about, and money starts to flow away from some essential areas towards the latest shiny topic.

Some of the trends in the last 25 years, in a rough chronology are:

• National security (when everyone had to connect their cause to America’s safety from terror post 9-11)

• Youth development (because the children are the future, right?)

• Microfinance (and then micro-everything: microcredit, microinsurance, etc)

• Impact investing (when every nonprofit wondered if they should start making profit)

• The morphing of social entrepreneurship into social enterprise and then into social business (ditto)

• Mobile tech (when every new impact organization’s name started with the letter “m”?)

• Gender (cue quips about women being the new youth)

• Climate change (and green-everything)

• DEI (and everything-justice)

Which brings us to Covid and its resulting focus on inner development and well-being, a major darling du jour.

This is going to be an unpopular opinion but I can’t wait for the wellbeing/inner development craze to pass. Because a lot of well-intentioned people are missing the point. It’s not about how you feel, it’s about what changes the world.

Now, a generous way to look at trendiness in social impact is that every new trend incorporates the best of the previous trends and moves the field forward. And to the extent that we can incorporate the best ways of caring for people’s mental health and wellbeing into our work, we should absolutely do that.

But, coming out of Covid, wellbeing in social impact seems to have become an end in itself and that’s where we’re losing the plot.

Part 2: Doing wellbeing before it was cool

I can make this claim because I worked on inner development for a decade before it became all the post-Covid rage. I believe whole-heartedly in the importance of changemakers knowing their strengths, weaknesses, shadows and blind spots, being able to manage for those and knowing when they need to step away to take care of themselves. I agree with Ryan Holiday in Ego is the Enemy:

“Perfecting the personal is what leads to success as a professional, but rarely the other way around… [understanding this] helps navigate the treacherous waters [changemaking] will require us to travel.”

That’s why, along with my colleagues at Amani Institute, we created a curriculum called The Inner Journey of the Changemaker, a required course in our ‘alternative master’s’ program. In working with the first 500 or so of our students (average age 30), we began to notice that no matter how much we emphasized that the inner journey was not an end in itself but an essential means to the end of changemaking, many of our students didn’t quite internalize that.

Which is understandable. Navel gazing is fun and changemaking often isn’t. We’re all aware of the shadow side of “doing” (busywork, death-by-meetings, meaningless short-term outputs like ‘number of people reached’, relentless productivity, and so on) and there is a natural instinct to consider the virtues of “being”. But we often forget about the shadow side of being (self-righteousness, entitlement, magical thinking, etc).

As this shadow side became clearer to us, we re-structured our curriculum to tamp down on the navel gazing and ratchet up the focus on how we work in relation to others. Moving quicker from self-awareness to self-management. This seemed to shift the tone.

But I came away from this period with a strong sense of this shadow side of focusing on inner development in social impact.

Part 3: The rise of wellbeing and inner development in social impact

In the previous century, many social change agents maximized self-sacrifice, leading to projecting their traumas or pathologies on the populations they were ostensibly helping, or burnout and other forms of martyrdom. Austerity became a badge of honor, and was often demanded by funders or elders in the field. In the face of such extremism, it was essential for changemakers to understand themselves and their motivations better, and what would both help them stay the course in the long run but also appeal to a wider audience to join their cause.

Then Covid hit. And one outcome of spending all that time watching death counts and hospitalizations soar across the world while having all professional interactions virtually was that our collective mental health went down the toilet. Other macro changes (racial reckonings, climate catastrophes, rising authoritarianism, eroding human rights, increasing feelings of powerlessness) exacerbated the problem, bringing many more forms of anxiety into the workplace.

In response, organization leaders were pushed to allocate more time and money to supporting staff wellbeing. A raft of webinars and coaches sprung up to cater for this. Then the push deepened and sector-wide efforts such as global networks and conferences were called for. A few examples:

• The Sustainable Development Goals was the social sector’s north star in the half-decade before Covid. Post-pandemic, a counter-movement called the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) emerged and gained in popularity.

• My favorite conference pre-Covid went from a focus on innovation, cutting-edge tech, and futurism to almost exclusively wellbeing and inner development topics this decade.

• The leader behind one of the most well respected fellowship programs in the world was considering re-centering their curriculum around mental health and wellbeing. I argued that they should be focusing on the skills to shift power instead. I don’t know what they decided but, given who they were, the conversation startled me.

• Plus dozens of other discussions, toxic workplace situations, and media reports of an incoming workforce with naïve expectations of what their workplace should provide them.

The pendulum swung to the other extreme, as pendulums are wont to do.

Part 4: Why this is a problem

Wanna nerd out some more?

Well, since you asked…

Where there’s light, there’s shadow. To the extent that wellbeing and mental health have become things to design for in organizational structures (beyond the basic human/labor rights that every worker is entitled to), that’s valuable. But to the extent it slows down progress or obstructs the messy work of actually making change, it’s counter-productive. Here’s how that happens:

1. Putting ‘being’ before ‘doing’

A common dogma is that you first have to change inside before effectively and meaningfully creating change out in the world. While there’s some truth here, it can also become an excuse to avoid doing very much, because there’s no end to plumbing the depths of our consciousness. At some point, going deeper and deeper is less useful than actually doing something with the insights from your initial self-exploration. Continuing inner work then masks a fear of failure.

It's easy to talk; it’s hard to walk the talk. So the goal should always be to deepen self-awareness while in action.

On this note, it’s striking how many organizations’ ‘Values statements’ have a value around “doing” or “bias towards action” or “getting things done”. This shouldn’t be necessary. But CEOs and EDs are constantly wary of staff who think critique and meetings are a form of action. In this case it’s not doing versus being, so much as doing vs talking. Sasha Dichter writes:

There are few stances than are easier and safer than describing what needs to be done, and placing the weight of inaction at someone else’s feet. And there are few stances more courageous than putting yourself on the hook, getting your own hands dirty, and walking the path from idea to implementation. That’s called leadership.

Being and doing should be infused in one movement, like breathing in and breathing out, each one essential and dependent on the other.

2. Thinking it’s about you

It’s not about you.

A recent New York Times piece asked, “Is Today’s Self-Help Teaching Everyone to Be a Jerk?”

There’s a certain flavor of advice that is dominating the self-help best-seller list. These books have titles like “The Courage to Be Disliked” and “Set Boundaries, Find Peace.” They tell readers not to worry so much about letting people down, not to answer those calls from aggravating friends, not to be afraid of being the villain. This all becomes more alarming when you think of the best-seller list as a mirror of the social moment, which some historians say it may be.

We need more people to get up from their literal and psychological asanas, to stop simply “being with what’s coming up for you”, and pick up a shovel. There’s so much work to do.

3. Secularism and its discontents

The vast majority in the professional social sector are progressives or old-school liberals. This makes sense because progressives are more likely to see what’s wrong with the world and want to fix it. They’re also less likely to be religious, and therefore less accepting that this is all part of God’s plan. Over 25 years, I can probably count on both hands the number of colleagues I’ve had with a consistent or overt religious practice.

But survey after survey, at least in the United States (great data here), has found that this makes progressives much unhappier than conservatives, which increases the demand for wellbeing services.

Inner work can then become a substitute for faith. Which makes it unsurprising that so many wellbeing practices superficially or even vacuously adopt techniques from spirituality while stripping away the context and meaning of those traditions, whether it’s Buddhism or Liberation Theology or Native American wisdom traditions. And don’t get me started on what’s happened to yoga – I’m looking at you, Lululemon.

4. Hiding from the world as it is

Back to that same New York Times piece:

Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that in a time of hyper-visible conflict — social media filled with memes of crying migrants shared by the official White House account, insults hurled in public between the country’s highest leaders — the self-help message of the day tells its readers that it’s perfectly OK to turn inward, even if that means ignoring the apparent travails of others. It’s a message retrofitted for appeal in a moment when every glance at a phone screen surfaces wrenching images of catastrophe.

The stakes of changemaking have gotten higher. I increasingly sense that our focus on inner work is a kind of hiding in a world that’s gotten much harder to operate in, with authoritarians curtailing civil society everywhere.

What are we supposed to do if we work our asses off and then the majority of our population, including many of the people we’re trying to help, votes strongmen into power? We become furious and frustrated with our impotence and our improbability of impact.

So retreating within to hide our exhaustion and despair and pessimism is only natural, even though it’s never been more important to face the world as it is. But are we becoming a sector of Neros, fiddling with ourselves while the world burns?

For what is the role of the changemaker in a post-(liberal-)democratic world? The answer will not (only) be found inside ourselves. We must create it, even if means going out there into the beautiful and terrifying uncertainty.

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(With thanks to Geraldine Hepp and Kabir Bavikatte for suggestions that much improved this piece.)

Something to Consider

The controversial essay a few years ago that first got me thinking about all this. Elephant in the Zoom.

Something to Quote

Each of us who decides to engage in social change…must find our own way to build an inner life against the possibility, and a certain measure of inevitability, of failure.

- Julian Agoun, The Properties of Perpetual Light