It’s Not Your Fault, You’re Not Alone, and There’s a Better Way

Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.

- Salvador Dali

I once had a psychedelic therapy session where there was a pleasant song with tribal beats playing on my headphones. I could feel these beats in my body as if they belonged to my bones, to my DNA. It dawned on me in that moment that such “tribal” beats (like this or this, for example) belong to white Europeans like myself as they do to Africans, South Asians, Pacific Islanders, or Indigenous Americans.

The difference is that my ancient ancestors were colonized by Rome and the Catholic Church thousands of years ago. All those pagan drum beats were literally beaten out of them. They weren’t even allowed to dance for centuries!

What we and much of the globe have lost over the last many hundreds (and for some, thousands) of years are traditional ways of growing, learning, connecting, grieving, and praising. The fact that most of us are sad, lonely, confused, numbed out, and sick only makes sense from this long historical perspective.

IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT

Your mental and emotional health challenges are not your fault. They are not the result of being biologically broken or a weak failure. I wrote about this a few weeks back. The available scientific research, reviewed nicely here, shows that the most common mental health conditions, like depression and anxiety, are caused NOT by neurochemical imbalance or genes, but rather childhood trauma and our current lack of deep social support.

YOU’RE NOT ALONE

Childhood trauma and our lack of social support are the result of a centuries-long upheaval that has transformed every single aspect of our collective environment. The name for this upheaval is modernity. Forces like capitalism, globalization, industrialization, urbanization, bureaucratization, individualization, and secularization have all unfolded for the past 600 years to fundamentally change nearly every aspect of human life.

From the food we eat and the air we breathe, to our family relationships and self-identities, in the West at least, we are living in ways that are profoundly different from the ways humans lived for 99.9% of our time on this planet. This way of life is so weird that academics have turned it into an acronym: WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic).

Most of the Western world is living under these forces and the rest of the world is quickly following. If you are sad, lonely, confused, numbed out, and sick, please know you’re not alone.

THERE’S A BETTER WAY

There have been countless “back to the land” movements since the beginning of modernity, from the Luddites and the Romantics to the Amish and the Hippies. And they’ve all given way to the inexorable force of modernity.

This isn’t because of the evil, imperial forces of greed and domination (although there’s plenty of those to go around). It’s because modernity solves big survival problems. Humans live longer, physically healthier lives than ever before. Most of our ancestors would be in awe at our food abundance, housing comforts, and disease control.

So, we’re stuck hurdling headlong into modernity. The good news is that modernity has also given us massive advantages in scientific and intellectual dynamism and learning. We now know what elements support human flourishing and different effective ways to deliver them.

I see my role as an emotional health coach as helping people live fully modern lives while repairing the damages of modernity, and learning new ways to navigate its most destructive aspects. Deep inner work isn’t just about mitigating the negative side effects; it’s about stepping more fully into our evolution as individuals and as a species.

The real hardships of modernity are not your fault and you’re not alone. But there’s a better way.