3.8 Hurting without hurting yourself
If you take humankind to heart…
You will hurt.
How could you not?
Take a look at this world of ours and you will see mass exploitation and mass suffering and so much evil it’s breathtaking.
But just because you’re hurting…
Does not mean you have to hurt yourself.
Let me talk about activists for a minute to explain this. Activists start with pain. They see the trouble we’re in and they hurt and they want to make things better. In short…
They feel for us humans and decide to fight for us.
But this impulse, so sweet and good in and of itself, can go wrong.
Take a second look at the world and you see that…
The problems are too big and too many and the activists are too few and too tired.
If you were to read out the honor roll of all the names of all the activists working hard to save us, it would take you days and days. It would be a big number. But compare that number with the total population of our species and it would seem tiny. Too tiny.
I remember back when I was a young and earnest activist, I confronted that disparity and thought since there aren’t nearly enough us, we’re each going to have to do more than our share. So I decided…
I had to do the work of two or three or four or more.
I decided that I had to give everything I had, and then…
More than everything I had.
I call this…
You sacrifice yourself—your personal life, your family, your health, your happiness—in order to play savior. And if you do this, if you put in crazy hours and wreck your relationships…
You will be hurting yourself in a deep and fundamental way.
And if that’s what it takes to save the world, then all I can say is…
Screw salvation.
It’s not worth the destruction of good people with good hearts.
And anyway saviors are not going to save us. Not even a multitude of them, because….
What we need are organizers.
If we can’t get the majority of humans to take action to prevent extinction, there’s no way to save ourselves. And so far it’s not looking good.
Sacrificial–saviors are not helping, not really. I remember when I was one, people would pat me on the back and thank me for what I was doing and say keep up the good work, but…
They didn’t want to live like me.
So I wasn’t attracting more people into the work.
By contrast, an activist of the organizer type is someone who takes very good care of herself and finds deep meaning in her work and has great relationships with her co–workers. She invites others in and they respond because when they look at her life they don’t see a dragged–down burnout. They see someone so alive that they are envious of her and want to be like her.
To my mind…
Upgrading love is the very heart of activism.
Yes, it scares a lot of people away. But there are those who find it compelling and are attracted.
And if you ask me, there’s no other kind of activism that goes as deep. No other activism goes down to the bottom of the human operating system like this does. And when you go down there, when you go down to the source of human evil and confront the very real possibility of human extinction, that can hurt like hell.
So if you follow the path of upgrading love you will hurt. There’s no way around it.
But the further you go with upgrading love, the better you get at telling the difference between…
Hurting that hurts you.
And…
Hurting that heals you.
In this increasingly scary and bitter world, there will be times when you feel for yourself in the midst of it all and…
You will just hurt and hurt
But then you decide to fight for yourself and…
You turn that hurting into healing.
