The problem with the problem
April 19, 2025
I go to seek a Great Perhaps.—François Rabelais (1483-1553)
We were talking about jobs, my colleague and I. We were asking each other, what makes work meaningful and a job worth having, paycheck aside? And how do you know when it’s time to make a change?
We agreed that, at least for us — we are both creative types — the key is that we need to keep growing. When the growing stops, then it’s time to move on.
It occurred to me even as we were speaking that this doesn’t just apply to the world found on LinkedIn. In our vocations but also our avocations (hers yoga, mine magic), our hobbies, our outside interests, even our relationships, life feels best when we see ourselves growing more into that special someone we can recognize and want to hang out with, when we see ourselves becoming more capable of navigating the river of time and enjoying our passage through it.
And so the world we create for ourselves, which includes our livelihood but also the people, places and activities we surround ourselves with, inhabits a kind of petri dish where we have created a cultural milieu in which we can thrive. Like a fertilized egg placed in a media-rich culture dish that allows it to divide into a many-celled embryo before being brought back to the womb, the right environment brings life to our lives.
That is why our current vile and violent cultural milieu — the problem facing us all — feels like such an assault on our sensibilities. Among the many outrages being foisted upon us right now, one that isn’t talked about but is just as insidious as any, is that our current environment is stultifying. It is stunting growth or obliterating it altogether.
Our lives feel on hold. We find our routines, our thoughts and even our sleep being interrupted constantly. We find ourselves having to row over to the shore and hop out to try to free the abducted, protect free speech, rally to Ukraine, protest the daily tragedy of Gaza, and minimize the great damage being done so everyone can get back on the boat. Because we are who we are, we would do these things anyway, but I suspect many of us feel it is extra effort that would not have been necessary if sheer common decency prevailed and if the rule of law was, well, the rule. Time is standing still while we hope for breakthroughs, and it’s painful. Life interrupted. That’s the problem with the problem.
There is an upside, however. Because this problem assumes that a moving organism can be cowed into stillness as a permanent state, it points to a way out: It can be an act of resistance, not to mention self-respect, to learn from this moment and claim it for personal and collective growth. It is no longer satisfactory to sit on the sidelines and hope others will fight for us. We’re it. As one sign I saw at a recent protest said, “THINGS ARE SO BAD, EVEN THE INTROVERTS ARE HERE.”
If we could look down from above and see ourselves in the petri dish, we might see our cells scrambling pell-mell as if in a pinball machine, bouncing off walls and into each other. Now imagine adding two drops: one resolve, the other courage. Suddenly the cells start banding together even as they continue to divide, the whole thing growing, becoming stronger, two by two then four by four, spiritual mitosis and spiritual meiosis. That’s how we get to a new movement ready to be born.
One catch, though: It only works in a culture of abiding love. All worth it, though, because then we would be growing once again. Even better, we would know that we are.