The Cost of Our Malaise Part 3: The Quiet Revolution

We have spent time talking about waking up our own senses and dropping the exhausting performance of "being fine." But once you have checked back in with yourself, you realise something: you are standing in a crowd of people who, for the most part, are slowly starting to feel the same way.

If we want to emerge from the chaotic, polarised mess society finds itself in, we need revolutionary acts, both big and small. To set change in motion, we need to begin with the kind that happens in smaller circles, the kind each and every one of us can enact.

How do we begin to break the cycle?

Connect with the person behind the role or mask.

In every encounter, at the supermarket, the petrol station, or the office, we make intentional but not intrusive eye contact (this will feel very strange at first), offer a sincere "Thank you," and actually mean it. It is a small way of letting others feel seen and appreciated.

Extend invitations outside your circle.

Include someone new, such as a friend of a friend, a new neighbour, or a colleague in a different department. We tend to huddle only with those with whom we feel comfortable, keeping our inner circle close and closed. It is time to make that circle bigger. Do this by inviting someone who is not in your immediate circle for something low-stakes: a ten-minute coffee, a tea ceremony, or a game of Padel. You are not looking for a best friend; you are trying to remember what meeting someone new feels like without an agenda.

Sit with yourself in silence, in meditation, or in prayer, but with a twist. 

This is perhaps the hardest act of all. Spend a few minutes in silence "holding" the people you find it hardest to get along with. Instead of replaying an argument or judging them, offer a silent wish that they find their way back to their own humanity, too. It is incredibly difficult to stay affected and angry when you choose to recognise someone else’s struggles, trauma, or downright unkindness. Doing this frees you from the burden of any toxicity, and the encounter might be the impetus for a new transformation for them as well on an unconscious level.

The Reset Begins with Us

We started this journey asking if "peopling" has become particularly hard of late. The answer is a resounding yes. We allowed ourselves to divest from our own autonomy, choosing the "quick fix" mentality and outsourced thinking until the cost was our very humanity.

But the malaise does not have to be permanent.

The reset we are longing for is not going to be handed to us by a system or an algorithm. It is something we have to choose, every single day, through the radical act of being present, honest, and kind. It is going to be hard. We were raised on cinematic endings and the myth of the lone hero. But the truth is more beautiful: we are all flailing in this sea together. And the moment we stop pretending we are fine and start reaching out, the water does not feel quite so cold.

Maybe it is time we finally checked back in and started living more consciously.