Broken Bonds and Busted Foundations
Excerpt from The Comeback Stack
LIFE ASSETS: The Only Way to Light Up Your Life
and Love It Again
You Are Better Than Burnout
Author’s Note. Read This First.
Before you begin with this excerpt, I’ll lay out what’s already been covered. In Sections One and Two of the book, readers discovered the inner framework that makes every comeback possible. Both sections are devoted to recognizing your Life Assets (the inner resources you’ve accumulated that enrich your life, and that are valuable and exchangeable with the world around you).
Within your portfolio of Life Assets, we focused on two:
- Your Values. The personal ideals, organizing principles, and natural priorities that keep you sane and true to yourself.
- Your STACKWINS. The unique collection of your Skills, Talents, Aptitudes, Competencies, Knowledge, Wisdom, Insights, Nature, and Strengths.
Together, these two Life Assets form the foundation of who you are, and give you the tools to experience success and satisfaction in everything you do.
This excerpt begins at a key moment in the book when I list the six megatrends found in the first of the four clusters of megatrends. Here you see only six of the twenty global pressures shaping how you live, work, and feel. While I have chosen to isolate these six into a group, and given that group a name, the megatrends included are not mine; nor are they theories. They are measurable forces acting on your brain, body, and choices every day. Each one is insidious, sneaking into your life, putting demands on you, pressuring you to comply.
You are about to put words to the feelings of stress that have been pulling you off your own path. Once you see these four clusters, you will have a hint of where your energy has been leaking. And I hope you’ll have a sense of indignant rebellion: you do not need to live by anyone else’s idea of success, happiness, or purpose.
Excerpt Series: The Comeback Stack
LIFE ASSETS: The Only Way to Light Up Your Life and Love It Again
You Are Better Than Burnout
Excerpt Table of Contents
Part 1: Your Shield Against the World
Part 2: The Systems That Profit from Your Energy
Part 3: Sovereignty Drift
Part 4: The Extraction Economy
Part 5: Broken Bonds and Busted Foundations
Part 6: The Body and Spirit Hijack
(You’re reading Part 3 of 6.)
Cluster One: Sovereignty Drift
The Success Hangover
Definition: Success hits, the goal delivers money, but misses the mark. Even with the promotion, the profit, the growth, the dream home and the rest, the rush fades fast, leaving you searching for meaning, and you wonder, why doesn’t this seem to matter as much as I thought it would.
The Trap: Dedicating yourself to use the bulk of your talents, skills, and efforts to go after a predefined path of success.
The Lie: There is a preordained path that is right, and if you work towards it, you will get fulfillment.
The Truth: The meaning of success can only come from you. No one else’s definition will fulfill your unique purpose, needs and desires.
The Cost: When you use your internal resources working on achievements that aren’t interesting and won’t fulfill you, your confidence to redirect your course falters, and so does your self worth, because you wonder whose life you’re living. It’s no wonder you feel burned out. You wonder where and how to restart. The idea of restarting feels exhausting. You might struggle with a haunting fear that it’s too late to start over. You might wonder how to make things right without blowing up your life completely. And of course, you wonder how to keep the parts of your life that are working intact if you make some big changes.
Alternative nomenclature for this mega trend: Quarter life crisis, midlife crisis, achievement anxiety and purpose deficit.
The Productivity Prison
Definition: Doing more and being more does not get you more. In fact, it feels like you’re getting less of what matters. Being busy, busy, busy with a checklist that never ends, an inbox that never empties, and trying to fit in all the right things keeps you more like a hamster on a wheel than a human being productive, and it seems the reward for efficiency is only more work.
The Trap: Organizing your life around hacks without checking if what you are doing is purpose driven, putting your real priorities low on your list, responding to external demands that drive you and everyone off a kind of performative productivity cliff.
The Lie: Life hacks or a new schedule will solve the problem. The lie is that output is the ultimate sign of productivity, like there’s a pot of gold waiting at the end of the right to-do list.
The Truth: Productivity is bigger than effort. It includes rest, reflection and even surrender. Productivity includes the things that make space for renewal.
The Cost: When you’re exhausted by busyness, you are losing steam and enthusiasm and it becomes a prison when you realize this is not taking you where you want to go and you don’t know how to get out. It’s no wonder you feel constrained by relentless expectations, like you race but never arrive. Of course, you have important things on your personal list that don’t get your attention, and it makes you feel like the very last thing on anyone’s to do list.
Alternative nomenclature for this megatrend: The productivity trap, always on culture, productivity culture, self optimization spiral and algorithmic oppression.
The Permanent State of Emergency
Definition: You barely recover from the latest crisis before the next one begins, so your nervous system is in perpetual red alert.
The Trap: Feeling responsible to pay attention to every crisis everywhere, all at once, and to weigh in or respond to every bit of bad news.
The Lie: Thinking that you can take in all the bad news, feel everything at once, react to it, process the drama, and then behave as if nothing happened. And the lie also is believing that knowing every crisis gives you an edge or keeps you sharp, or that it matters.
The Truth: You must decide what crisis you’ll take part in. You must define and choose what bad news or battles are meant for you, and thereby protect yourself from the hype. You must be able to stand back, take a breath and choose and let your wisdom tell you what is the real crisis to attend to.
The Cost: When you give up your time, attention and energy and become enslaved by an agenda that is not yours, you will suffer chronic stress and distraction and worse, a deep sense of powerlessness. Your physiology will never settle. And the frustration of not being able to have impact will wear you down. It’s no wonder you feel tense like you always have to be ready, hyper-vigilant, hyper-focused, hyper-responsive. Of course, you are on edge, then maybe it makes you feel like you might snap, and you feel curt, crabby or angry, or tipping towards panic and anxiety or depression.
Alternative nomenclature for this megatrend: Crisis culture, lack of recovery, attention economy burnout, waiting for the collapse.
The Crisis of Self Confidence
Definition: From the outside you seem strong and confident, but inside, you feel the pressure of comparison, and it causes waves of wondering if you’re meeting expectations. It ends in a pervasive sense of self doubt.
The Trap: Beginning and ending your days comparing yourself to a standard that’s impossible to meet or to someone else’s abilities, talents or success, and even worse, measuring yourself against someone else’s values instead of Your Values.
The Lie: To believe that a standard, someone else’s standard, is better than yours, or someone else has it all together, and is always doing better, or to think that Your Values and your standards aren’t good enough.
The Truth: Your confidence only builds when you act on your own values and leave your comparison to you compared to yourself. The world needs you and Your Values as they are.
The Cost: When you feel like what you’ve got to offer to the world is not enough, you feel small. You feel unworthy. It’s no wonder you feel self doubt, if you are valuing other people’s qualities, attributes and contribution as bigger, better or more important than yours. Of course, it gets hard to remember who you are and what you’re standing for.
Alternative nomenclature for this megatrend: Comparison culture, social media envy, imposter syndrome and self worth deficit.
The Loneliness and Longing Epidemic
Definition: Friendships and community seem harder to come by as it’s turned into feeds instead of faces. Places where we would typically physically meet are vanishing, and even when you are surrounded by voices, it seems like real connection is missing. It’s a kind of starvation.
The Trap: Giving up on friendship and giving in to the narrow narratives that accept screens and devices as pals, that let the digital noise fill the space, so you postpone seeking real connection.
The Lie: Connection and community are things of the past and that no one’s out there who will understand you or care about you.
The Truth: Longing is solved by presence, by being with other people, sharing stories, sharing the ups and downs of life, not simply by proximity or social sharing on an app. Everyone wants the same thing, to connect and to belong.
The Cost: When the restless energy of invisibility distorts your perception of your own relevance and importance, you feel insignificant. You feel alone, even in a crowd. It’s no wonder you feel isolated. You’re a human being. Of course, you need the nourishment of connection, and without it, you feel distracted and maybe drawn in by unhealthy coping mechanisms or a running loop of your own faults or inadequacies. Of course, it’s not a surprise if you start to shut yourself off from a world you don’t know how to penetrate.
Alternative nomenclature for this megatrend: Social isolation epidemic, digital disconnection, community breakdown and relational poverty.
The Fear of Human Obsolescence
Definition: Robots and AI are doing more and more of what humans do, and we’re told that this will continue so humans may have more time on their hands, but less to do than ever. People will lose jobs, and no one knows how this will turn out. Is it the beginning of a dystopian future?
The Trap: Minimizing the extraordinary nature of being human in the depth, breadth and scope of human intelligence.
The Lie: Human intelligence and artificial intelligence run the same kind of programs, only based on rational reasoning and pattern recognition.
The Truth: When human beings and AI are put side by side, human intelligence is broader, deeper and more dynamic, and is beyond simple rational reasoning and pattern recognition. AI is a tool. It’s through the vast expression of your humanity that you are at the heart of the world’s evolution.
The Cost: The hype is tiresome, and the questions about AI and the future are exhausting. The pressure to figure out the future while you catch up and keep up with what to use and how to use it is overwhelming. It’s no wonder, when you’re told daily that AI can replace you, that you start to believe it’s possible. It does feel like a dystopian nightmare. Of course, you want to value your own unique human contribution. You don’t want to be treated as expendable, but as a unique and necessary part of existence.
Alternative nomenclature for this megatrend: Automation anxiety, technological unemployment fears, human displacement syndrome and AI existential crisis.
That’s the first cluster of megatrends.
Which ones have most impacted you?
Research on these six megatrends shows us they account for much of humanity’s mental stress, and perhaps mental illnesses. Feeling stressed when challenged by these forces is normal, isn’t it?
Stress is the body’s and mind’s feedback that something we value seems threatened.
(If a stress response is a sign of the body’s and mind’s intelligence, why, then, is it defined as something wrong with a person, rather than a system?)
Though knowing about the megatrends doesn’t stop them, it does restore a sense of sanity when you realize it is possible to resist their power over your life. (And, you can. That’s what this book is all about.)
I’m bringing this long list of megatrends to your attention to help you to see the context of the world within which you’re living, and to help you understand that while you may feel swept up in what’s happening, there are ways to limit (or even opt out of) one or all of these.
The definitions, traps, lies, and costs I’ve shared are not a list of complaints. I list them to help you recognize the forces around you that are challenging and changing the world right here, right now.
Knowing what they are might bring you peace of mind. Or, maybe talking about them with your family, business partners, friends, or wise counselors or advisors will strengthen your bonds or help you with your resolve to live a more intentional path. Or, maybe you’ll become an expert in dealing with one or more of them, and that will offer you a new business idea that helps others deal with them. However, my primary motive for showing them to you is to emphasize what we’ve talked about earlier in this book: Your Life Assets (specifically, Your Values, plus your STACKWINS, i.e. your skills, talents, aptitudes, competencies, knowledge, wisdom, insights, nature and strengths) are the only things you have to help you maintain your personal sovereignty even as the world turns.
When you are really clear about the fact that your Life Assets are resources that protect you (and also protect who and what you love) from the negative pressures of these megatrends, then you will have what you need to live in an enlightened state of enthusiasm instead of an endarkened state of burnout.
Postscript: End-of-Part Reflection
You’ve now seen the first cluster, Sovereignty Drift, containing six megatrends shaping your life.
In the next part of this series, we’ll move on to the next cluster, which I call The Extraction Economy. In it, we’ll talk about the systems that monetize your attention and that get you to spend, that are watching and predicting your behavior and that are using you for their own means and profit, that are confusing your sense of what health and wellness mean, and that are making you feel dependent. Each one of them profits by capturing your money, your space, your data and your allegiance, your fear and your wish for something better.
But, remember, the reason you are here is to identify them. Then, the next time one of them tries to drag you where you don’t want to go, you will say “Caught ya. Nope.”
