A sense of purpose and meaning often define a successful life. Yet, personal success and collective success are often at odds and require very different strategies.
Pursuing a sense of meaning and purpose often takes the form of personal advancement. Personal advancement requires consumption, which stokes neoliberal capitalism, and often more than what’s required to live a baseline, sustainable life. Consumption beyond a modicum stokes greenhouse gases, global warming, environmental collapse, and extinction.
Nothing is wrong with promoting ourselves as long as it advances others (especially nature and marginalized people) simultaneously. Because social and environmental injustice continue to worsen in many ways, the balance to be truly “purposeful” needs to shift with changing times.
To this end, we need to find a sense of fulfillment in truly helping others. It may even mean abandoning what we have been doing if it is largely geared towards promoting ourselves and not directly enough promoting justice. We might even have to drop our self-importance altogether, or as much as possible to still pay the bills and feel good enough about the world we build with our choices.
The degrowth movement is a crucial one for sustainability and regeneration, and it can be a north star for cultivating a sense purpose. Degrowth means to consume less of everything, and doing less that injures the world around us. Following the principles of degrowth, we can reexamine and restructure all our notions of what “personal growth” and “sense of purpose look like.”
In other words, our sense of meaning and purpose needs to benefit the natural world if we are to have a future at all in which to contemplate the luxury of a sense of purpose. Maybe meaning and purpose mean doing everything we can to slow the economy and next to nothing to build our own ego and profits above a baseline. Maybe “poverty”—as in not hoarding and using more than we need, and not stoking capitalism that drives the heat engine of society—is the new “richness”? If so, we’d have to agree on this together to create equality and equity for our future.
A lot of new age coaches and gurus promote the idea of finding purpose and meaning in life as a cure for nihilism, emptiness, depression, and feeling lost. A personal sense of purpose can indeed help for these maladies. Yet, the problem with this message is that a culture of hedonism and self-centeredness informs what these pursuits look like. We can’t go on consuming “purpose” merely for human belonging. Our purpose needs to not only lift us up but also the world around us.
Following “personal” goals and dreams in the age of climate crisis should not just be informed by a neoliberal mindset, or at least not only so. This is because personal pursuits of purpose often include consuming resources that expend valuable raw materials (ie. resources), contributing to global warming, and do not entail enough payback for the greater good of the community. This is a kind of personal advancement that could be considered pathological because it fails to demonstrate balance commensurate with global crisis.
I am therefore sounding the call for us to question and challenge spiritual, self-help, and alleged “thought leaders” of our day that promote self-advancement and a sense purpose that fail to include as primary the betterment of justice and advancement of others and the natural world. For example, before publishing my book Climate Cure I asked and sat with an earnest question: is my book worth the paper and ink and distribution pollution to produce. For someone else it might look like evaluating whether the amount they drive is worth the greater good (this is why I often do not have an issue with climate scientists and activists flying to do their work), if the electricity used for a project for is worth the gain for the whole family, the broader community, and the atmosphere, or if the carbon footprint of an art project is worth it . . . and if there is a substitute that could be installed that causes gain and tolerable sacrifice.
With input from others, I decided my book project was worth it, and I went the extra length to demand recycled paper and soy inks. It offers crucial information in a creative context offered nowhere else. I made sure my book would be offered on Kindle too. Writing stokes my own creativity and sense of purpose while advocating for the natural world, community, and deep self-work to increase integrity. It promotes cultivating mental-emotional emotional health, not just for personal or even relationship wellness, but as a path to free up our hearts and sharpen our minds for global, big picture survival and thriving.
Now I pose the question to you: what intuitions and intimations arose for you while reading? What are the ways you know you need to change but have resisted? How does if feel to contemplate a decrease in personal gain and comfort to creatively redesign your life to live in alignment with our times?
Related Reading:
Head and Heart
Fear of Fear, and Love
Lockdown and Degrowth
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