#10 - Bridging Islands.

Renarrating a world where crisis is either your fault, or your problem.

Hey. 👋🏼

Welcome to Untethered — a hopeful discussion of community, care and crisis under capitalism.¹

Untethered has been on hiatus over the school holidays here in Australia due to #reasons. It’s a tricky time in our house, and unfortunately, writing requires spare nervous system capacity, which is, thankfully, slowly returning.

Thanks for your patience!

If you’re new here, this is part of a series unpacking the feeling of being caught between the drive to be free and the yearning to belong.

Each newsletter kind of makes sense on its own, but if you want to get the whole story, you can start here and follow along.

Take care,

Shane

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Just let me have my moment.

The always on point @jmcgg

There’s a great episode of the podcast Song Exploder where The Decemberist’s frontman Colin Meloy somewhat sheepishly tries to explain how he found himself writing a song that’s the lyrical equivalent of a toddler’s temper tantrum fused with a very grown-up pity party. As a successful musician with a loving family, hordes of fans and an otherwise wonderful life, he’s fully aware it could appear painfully self-indulgent if we didn’t all relate to exactly what he’s talking about.

The ear-worm level chorus echoes:

“Oh, for once in my

Oh, for once in my life

Could just something go

Could just something go right?

I've been waiting all my life

I've been waiting all my life

All my life

My life”

We’ve all had those weeks where collapsing dramatically on the floor and shouting at the sky feels like the most reasonable option. It doesn’t have to be an actual life crisis — sometimes it’s just the overwhelming culmination of mildly irritating events that can completely undo us.

In these moments, we long for someone who sees how spleen-rupturingly frustrating it all is — despite how hard we’ve tried — and will affirm how arbitrarily unfair life can be. If only an adult would scoop us up and announce that they’ve arranged for a holiday from having to do and be and fix all the things all the time. Whispering to us, “You did your best. I’m here now, and it’s going to be ok.” while handing us the perfect Negroni and a good novel.

Meloy comments: “Oh, for once in my life, could just something go right? I honestly do think when you feel that way, it is all-encompassing; it is that feeling that can erase everything else. To feel that put-upon, even if you realise you’re blowing things way out of proportion, I think it’s okay [laughter] to do that, you know? There’s something therapeutic about the celebration of feeling that sorry for yourself. And as somebody who tends to do that [laughter], sometimes I need to be able to celebrate it.”

You gotta get up eventually, I guess.

But as justified as we are feeling this way, we know that the most likely outcome is that we’ll eventually pull ourselves together and find a way of carrying on. Learning personal responsibility is part of growing up and is essential to the process of individuation as we develop into adults. More often than not, when that all-encompassing wave of rage and pity subsides, we pick ourselves up, give ourselves a brief pep talk, and get on with things.

We deeply value resilience, determination, and perseverance in the West. We retell variations of The Hero’s Journey, people who set out on grand adventures, triumphing against the odds to make their mark on the world and achieve prosperity and acclaim.

More often than not, the most prized stories are those of individuals who appeared to do so without outside help. Which is, of course, bullshit. It’s almost inevitable that no matter how challenging their circumstances, any such story has simply erased the networks of care and cooperation that allowed them to flourish. Self-sufficiency is an illusion that we have been trained to want to believe in.

Little wonder, when we find ourselves at the limits of our capacity, we conclude that there must be something wrong with us.

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Welcome to a new era of suffering.

Bruce Rogers-Vaughn has worked as a Pastoral counselling therapist for over thirty years. In his therapy room, he noticed a distinct change in how his clients perceived suffering and attempted to manage it:

The average individual I encounter in the clinical situation today is not the same as the person who sat with me 30 years ago. Sometimes the changes are subtle. Often they are obvious. But they are pervasive and apparently widespread. There has been a marked increase in self-blame among those seeking my care, as well as an amorphous but potent dread that they are somehow teetering on the edge of a precipice.

Bruce Rogers-Vaughn, Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age

When faced with challenging life situations, his clients increasingly articulated a deep sense of personal failure coupled with a rhetoric of self-blame. The combination of guilt and helplessness left many with a general sense of dread about their situation, “manifesting in a vague and difficult-to-define anxiety” and the belief that they alone were responsible for managing their problems.

Interestingly, their relationships increasingly appeared contrived and transactional, and they had less connection to collectives of care, instead relying on more fluid relational networks.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just can’t keep up at work.”
“I’ve applied for over 30 jobs; am I just unemployable?”
“Am I achieving my dreams? Not really; I can barely get the kids to school.”

Rogers-Vaughn’s research into this phenomenon led him down a path of exploring the impact of neoliberal narratives on society. What he concluded was that while our exposure to crisis and suffering is much the same as the rest of history, how we metabolise it has radically changed.

Suffering has transformed from an experience processed and negotiated within community to an experience processed and negotiated within ourselves.

In fact, he argues that our modern approach to suffering has become a source of suffering itself. Not only do we experience suffering, but we have also internalised responsibility for it and struggle to fully comprehend its source - a phenomenon he calls “Third-Order Suffering.”

Crisis and hardship are nothing new in the story of human history. Finding meaning amidst loss, grappling with our finitude, cursing our fate and our unpredictable bowels in tandem, trying to appease the fates who seem to have turned against us — these are all well-trodden paths as we have processed the elation, loss, joy, boredom and sheer devastation that make up our lives as humans.

There are a bunch of ways of articulating different kinds of hardship in different philosophical and religious traditions — the framework Rogers-Vaughn outlines two initial orders:

First-order suffering.

First-order suffering is the experience of crisis that is part and parcel of being human—death, loss, natural disasters, illness, etc. Volcanoes explode, bodies break down, and plagues sweep the earth. We are fragile mammals, and these inescapable realities are an unavoidable part of life.

Second-order suffering.

Rogers-Vaughn defines second-order suffering as “distress produced by human evil, whether individual or collective, direct or indirect.”

We fight, we compete, we stress each other out. Some hoard wealth while others starve, and others pack the dishwasher so poorly that it completely ruins sensible people’s tenuous grip on sanity. Relationships are strained, mended at great cost, and sometimes break down altogether. Some people are mean, others just clumsy. Feelings are hurt, hearts are broken, and traumatic events leave us with ongoing repercussions.

Unacceptable. This is not full. Do better.

Rogers-Vaughn notes that these “orders” have been with us throughout human history. So, what has changed?

He argues that the rise of autonomous individualism, along with the breakdown of collectives—among other factors—has radically altered the context in which we process suffering, namely how we make sense of it, our ability to identify its source, where we place responsibility for navigating it, and the resources on hand for metabolising it.

He calls this…

Third-order suffering.

In essence, third-order suffering is “the internalisation of responsibility for suffering.”²

Another way of saying it is that suffering may or may not be your fault, but it is definitely your problem. When crisis hits, it’s your job to muster the resources to survive it, understand it, and fix it. Congratulations, you are the new Project Manager, H.R. Manager, P.R. Manager, Procurement Officer, E.A., P.A. and Worker Drone all rolled into one.

There’s a lot to say about this, but I want to draw attention to two key dimensions of this:

Don’t look up.

Capitalism has taught us that we live in a world of opportunity, where life is a competition, and all it takes is a little grit and determination to climb to the top. “Losers” are shamed for not trying hard enough, and sociopaths are lionised. When we’re not keeping up, we are trained to believe that the problem must lie with us, without reflecting on the system we live in:

• Do you need welfare because you’re not trying hard enough or because you live in an economic system that willingly creates 5% unemployment to keep inflation down?

• Are you falling behind on your KPIs because your mindset is too small or because human brains were not built to spend 10 hours straight staring at spreadsheets, and your KPIs were arbitrarily created to increase your productivity with more regard for shareholder value than human flourishing?

• Are you struggling with feelings of rage because you’re a terrible person or because you live in a culture where you have no way to share your feelings of grief and loss without being shamed or ridiculed?

In short, when faced with a crisis, our gut instinct is trained to look first at why we are performing so poorly in a world that has set us up to succeed (and appears to work so well for everyone else!) rather than wonder whether the water we swim in is actually poisonous. Do we not own a house because of too many cafe breakfasts or the commodification of a basic human right?

Are you failing due to a lack of effort in a healthy system or despite plenty of effort in an unsustainable one? You may never know because while previous generations and other cultures have had collectives that helped locate and narrate suffering within a communal wisdom tradition, we’re out here Project Managing it for ourselves while trying not to let it spill over lest people either blame us for bringing it on ourselves in the first place or run away terrified that it’ll become their problem too.

Which brings me to my second observation:

You’re broken; you fix it.

In a world where no one owes anyone anything, we can easily find ourselves walking the tightrope of seeking care while not appearing needy or violating the hidden social contract we have formed that requires us not to be a burden on anyone.

This is primarily due to our disconnection from the kinds of collectives and communities that once held us in our pain and shaped our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. Suffering has always been a part of life. Carrying it alone hasn’t.

Rogers-Vaughn describes this as a state of “spiritual homelessness” experienced by neoliberalism’s subjects—cut off from the kinds of community that once helped individuals make sense of suffering by narrating it, and themselves, into a larger story of human experience, leaving them adrift from the external resources they need to navigate life’s challenges.³ Suffering is no longer widely understood as a communal experience metabolised by a collective mutual obligation — where if one suffers, we all suffer; it’s now perceived as an individual affliction to be navigated in isolation in ways that minimise any impact on the broader community.

Welcome to Third-order suffering, where the First and Second-orders are either your fault or your problem. Even if your hardship is unavoidable, the default setting is that it is yours to solve.

This newsletter is largely about our identity and how it is shaped by a story driven by a particular form of economics. As

J. P. Hill

articulates so well, despite the popular saying, in this world you are told that you are, in fact, an island.

Our conditioning runs deep. We’re told, implicitly and explicitly, that we have to do a lot of this life alone. Maybe our immediate family is included in that vision, but the premise remains that each of us is an island. The countless ties to others, to neighborhoods and society at large and people around the world through political and economic connections and systems much larger than ourselves, are not given primacy. The reality that we are but a small part of many networks that are much bigger than any one of us is not a primary lens through which most of us have been taught to see the world, and our place in it.

J. P. Hill

- Do we aspire to isolation?

Photo by Ahmed Yaaniu on Unsplash

Ideally, the sun will shine, coconuts will grow, and your fresh water spring will continue to flow. But if a storm strips it bare, a horde of pirates arrive, or a wayward mine washes up on your shore, you’re on your own. It’s up to you to deal with it. The best you can hope for is a nuclear family to pitch in (although, **plot twist** sometimes it turns out that they’re, in fact, pirates carrying land mines!)

Here, when it comes to our most desperate moments, we struggle to believe anyone owes us the kind of care that would allow us to inconvenience others.⁴ Reciprocal mutual care is now an anomaly rather than a default, and building bridges to other islands to reach out for care is harder than ever.

There are many reasons for this crisis of isolation, but one factor has been the closure of our community spaces. As these places have been shut down, it has become harder than ever for people to have the day to day interactions that give us all a sense of connection and belonging…

The loss of these public spaces is undermining the bonds that tie us together and eroding the fabric of our communities. It is now harder than ever to find open, welcoming spaces in which to meet your neighbours, participate in activities, or just escape from the cold.

Grace Blakely’s Substack, What Can We Do?

But remember, this is a story. One story among many.

It’s not the only story.

Resistance happens when we tell other stories. When we remember other stories. In doing so, we slowly notice other stories that are still true, more true, even as they are obscured by this one.⁵

Communities have been caring, villages have been villaging, friends have been friending, Aunties have been Auntieing, and parents have been nurturing for all of human history.⁶

If we resist the lie that everybody we know is nothing more than a soulless self-interested competitor, we begin to notice all the ways we already depend on each other for survival and how much care already exists outside “the economy”.

We can learn to build bridges; to foster networks of care; to take brave risks; to notice and name our interdependence. Bruce Rogers-Vaughn has called depression a marker of resistance to the system we live in — our bodies crying out that something is broken with the culture we find ourselves in and demanding change.⁷

The You You Are.

(Sorry, I love Severance too much.)

This newsletter is about a bunch of things: economics, culture, crisis, and care… but at its heart, it will continue to return to identity. Because how we understand who we are in the world will shape what we expect of it, and ourselves.

If we are individual competing isolated units, then when crisis happens, it is our job to process the hardship that comes our way, and hope like hell we have the resources to manage it, and fervently avoid getting caught up in other’s shit.

But if see ourselves as part of a living human web, then we understand that no one survives alone, and we can shift our focus to fostering sustainable and durable collectives of care.

And maybe, every once in a while, someone kind might just indulge the occasional (totally justified) tantrum.

Take care,

Shane

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If you enjoyed this and want to see where we’ve been, start here:

1. You know it’s a quality publication with that much alliteration. Not just anyone can pull this off.

2. Rogers-Vaughn, Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age. https://www.brucerogersvaughn.com/book

3.

Amanda Litman

describes the sheer logistical challenges of getting together here:

We ran into this constantly over the last year. In an effort to give our weekend with our kid some structure, we’d send a barrage of texts every Thursday or Friday to try and schedule a weekend get-together. Every week, it felt like we’d get back a stream of no’s or maybe-next-times, or just no answer. Sometimes we’d have something on the books and a few hours before, someone would flake.

This sent me spiraling. Does everyone secretly hate me? Do I suck? Am I needy? On and on and on.

4. Please note that even as I say this, I can feel the counterpoint in my body. For anyone who’s had to care for a narcissist, been taken advantage of, or had their boundaries stretched beyond their limits, you’ll know all too well what it feels like to have lost too much to someone who is all too happy to ask. This side of the story matters, too, and I’ll get to it as we go, but I believe the answer lies in a more robust view of community that doesn’t separate love from accountability.

5. Heck, as

Elissa Strauss

outlines, even some of our core capitalist stories such as those that draw on Charles Darwin misrepresentations of his work!

“Darwin believed sympathy, or what today we might think of as empathy, altruism, or compassion, is the “all-important emotion,” part of the pulsing origin of the social instinct. We can’t take good care of our children without sympathy, and without it our children wouldn’t survive. Therefore, “communities which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.” - We got Darwin all wrong

6. Ok, so one of those was just for fun… you’ll have to work out which.

7. For you psych nerds, this paper is gold.