Somewhere in there lies the sweet spot where our human

7 min readNov 20, 2020

That was all the proof I needed but I got even more proof. When I looked at the dating history of the people I was with, they too eventually became second-best in their own romances.It’s a label that gained recognition far too late. Essential workers are rarely celebrated, even though the people who pick our fruit and look after our kids and care for our elderly parents are arguably more responsible for our survival than ourselves. Our career-focused ambition has allowed for a sense of removal from our actual survival and a denial of the humanity of a huge subset of people who help us stay alive.“What people need to grieve is the world they thought they were living in, the future they thought they had,” Salamon said in a phone interview. “The process of grieving is very tied up in the process of reckoning.” And that grief and reckoning, she added, leads to “a process of adapting to a new reality.”

Adaptation may look different for different people, but I think it starts with facing this disconnect head-on: Our individualized, highly specialized career ambition is no longer a suitable match for the world we’re living in. Hastened by the pandemic, many knowledge-economy workers are, as British broadcaster and journalist Bidisha wrote in the Guardian, facing our own “professional obsolescence.”

By letting go of the subconscious program that love is about being second-best, I haven’t experienced that issue since. This is why I firmly believe that the law of attraction/the law of mirroring is real.
It’s already happening, albeit belatedly, in some contexts. You can see it in California, where state officials are finally engaging with indigenous leaders on traditional methods of fire suppression after years of trying to fight (and in the process worsening) the state’s naturally occurring wildfires. You can see it in people who used to spend one-third of their lives in airports now realizing that it is, by every metric, a pathologically unsustainable and totally absurd way to live — both for a person and the planet. You can see it in the surge in demand for land allotments in the U.K., perhaps a manifestation of the “urgent biophilia” that emerges each time humans face catastrophe, and in the growing number of young Lebanese farmers who are meeting the country’s chronic instability by producing food on abandoned land.
Similarly, people who try the LOA don’t get their desires fulfilled because they don’t believe that their desires would get met in the first place. That is the subconscious belief that causes them to be enamored by the LOA as a manifestation tool in the first place.

But embracing adaptation as an alternative is not saying that we can’t be creative or innovative or willing to work hard — on the contrary, we must be all those things. But it calls us to shift those skills elsewhere, beyond our personal interests and egos to communal and societal challenges that are collective. It also calls us to redefine what it means to live a “successful” life.

When someone becomes a thief or a scam artist, why do you think they did that? It’s because they didn’t believe that they could get what they wanted legitimately. Or perhaps, they believed rich people are crooks and so in order to be rich, they have to be a crook too.

For those of us who can — those of us who right now have the headspace, the financial security, the resources — modeling and facilitating this kind of acceptance and shift from ambition to adaptation may have a multiplier effect. “True cultural change doesn’t happen unilaterally,” Yunkaporta writes in his paradigm-bending book, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. “Cultural innovations occur in deep relationships between land, spirit, and groups of people.”

And yet, we cannot outachieve or outrun our sense that something is very off. Salamon — who founded The Climate Mobilization, a group advocating for a World-War-II-scale mobilization to fight climate change — says the first step is feeling the grief for what we’re losing.

As survival goes, it’s a pretty shaky strategy. As the early days of lockdown showed us, spreadsheets and Google Analytics aren’t what anyone needs in a crisis. Many of us engaged in what late anthropologist David Graeber once famously termed “bullshit jobs” and are entirely dependent on that cohort of people we began calling “essential workers” in 2020.
Let’s think critically for a minute. If you are using the LOA to get something, wouldn’t that imply that you don’t think you can get what you want naturally, and so you have to use something to get what you want?
The good news is that we as humans are uniquely equipped to do this, says aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta, who is a member of the Apalech clan from Western Cape York in Australia. Taking an indigenous perspective, he said in an interview with the Rebel Wisdom podcast, allows us to see “the most important gift is reclaiming the adaptive capacity of our species. It is our unique gift … to be able to adapt to massive changes and massive traumas. Acceptance is part of our human knowledge systems — any knowledge system that is still human and not domesticated.”

There’s a certain personal relief, I think, in admitting that your ambition is no longer that useful. Because it’s hard to have a foot in both worlds: to do the daily emotional work of trying to reconcile the horrific things going on around you with the self-interested and superficial things you want for yourself in the future. Instead, you can start thinking about how to apply your own efforts, talents, and creativity to the world’s existential peril rather than pretend the future will be fine as you power through yet another brutal workweek.

Do you use the law of gravity to keep yourself on the ground? Do you use the law of gravity when you play football? Of course not. That wouldn’t make sense. The law of gravity is always in effect so to try and use it is to try and control a variable that you cannot control.

We all had the belief that we were second-best and then chose people who would prove that to us. Or, we were chosen by people who believed they were second-best and then we reflected their belief back to them.
On a personal level, this shift could take many forms. Maybe it means you focus on building social capital in your community rather than a LinkedIn or Instagram following. That you downsize or move to a cheaper place and acquire less stuff so you can work less, produce more, and rely less on globalized supply chains. Maybe it means re-skilling and re-networking yourself (in an offline sense) so you have more to offer your immediate community and vice versa. Maybe you channel your penchant for spreadsheets or publicity or social media into the climate movement, an urgent local environmental cause, or advocating for universal basic income.

“When you avoid the truth [of environmental collapse,] you put the energy that could be used towards preventing the climate emergency towards safeguarding the fiction you’ve created yourself,” Salamon writes in her book Facing the Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself With Climate Truth. “But it is an incredible relief to let go of your defenses, your vigilance, your effort to safeguard and deny. … It may be hard to believe, but fully integrating climate truth into your life will make you lighter, less encumbered, and more capable of facilitating change.”

Indeed, many of us are living in a disconnect: working in service of ourselves and our own narrowly defined, future-facing goals without seeing that the future on the horizon is one where many of those goals simply won’t be possible anymore thanks to the climate emergency.Taking the time and space to adjust to these seismic shifts may require changing your entire life, what you thought you wanted, and who you thought you were. And when you do it, it also means you will feel compelled to act.And that cognitive dissonance, says psychologist and climate activist Margaret Klein Salamon, requires a lot of mental work to maintain — work that could instead be put toward confronting the existential challenge we face.
This requires an emotional and spiritual depth and fortitude that our culture does not encourage us to cultivate. We don’t even have a language for acknowledging that we’ve gotten ourselves into a situation that money and hard work and ingenuity can’t solve.

Somewhere in there lies the sweet spot where our human

Written by Yecebir