The Only Healthy Way to Relate to Our Troubled World
We have 4 choices. 3 are unhelpful.
Reading the news these days is disheartening, to say the least. In fact, it has been disheartening for so long now that we may not recognize how it affects us.
How it contributes to a sense of despair. How it can lead us to shut down and try to shut it all out. And, perhaps most importantly, how it can make us feel helpless.
We may be valiantly trying to improve our corner of the world, but a rhetorical question often hangs in the air: What can I do in the face of people and systems that are, by any measure, more powerful than me?
Those are some toxic seas to swim in.
So, it helps to pull back, consider our options for relating to a world grappling with both democracy and a climate on the brink, and choose and cultivate the role that has the best chance of serving us and others.
The Four Options
The first option is the villain—and yes, there are plenty of these on the world stage at the moment. However, most of us are not inclined this way, so we can dismiss this one for the sake of this exercise.
The second option is the bystander who thinks, “I can’t do anything about the problems we face,” or “Someone else will have to rise to the challenges.”
The role of the bystander is understandable but, unfortunately, all too common and completely unhelpful—for individuals, organizations, and society.
Just look at the rate of disengagement in workplaces—nearly 7 out of 10 people are disengaged, according to the 2024 Gallup workplace study. Sure, there are plenty of factors that go into explaining that. But feeling as if one cannot make a difference is undoubtedly part of it. And it doesn’t help us make anything better.
The third option is the victim. Few of us like to think of ourselves in these terms consciously, and yet it can be tempting to do so unconsciously, even on the most committed mission-driven, purpose-driven, change-making teams.
The reason is simple: We see ourselves up against those villains pursuing profit and power at all costs, the health of our democracy and environment be damned. See yourself in a relationship with a villain or perpetrator of wrongs, and falling into the victim trap often follows.
But this option is also unhelpful.
As international climate leader Christiana Figueres recounted in a conversation last week at Plum Village, breaking out of the victim-perpetrator dynamic played a part in her success in leading the process that secured the landmark Paris Agreement.
“I realized that I was in a dynamic with my mother and with my former husband and that I saw myself as a victim and the two of them as perpetrators in different chapters of my life,” Figueres said. “When I started to heal that dynamic, I started to see without preaching anything that dynamic lift in the conversation between governments because what we do inside has a reflection outside.”
This brings us to the final and only helpful option for relating to a world in turmoil — the hero.
But for this to truly be helpful, we must re-imagine what it means to be heroic today.
Put another way—with all due respect to Joseph Campbell, who contributed so much to our understanding of the hero’s journey—we must take the idea of heroism out of the world of mythology and consider what it means in the real world.
Real-World Heroism
To strive to be heroic means to strive to be a person of courage, altruism, and integrity.
To name just a few points about what this looks like in the real world today:
It is gender-inclusive and comes in all ages, abilities, and every other representation of the diversity of human life we can name.
It is less about having the physical valor to tackle larger-than-life threats and more about developing the inner resources to do so.
It’s not about conquest—quite the opposite.
It’s not simplistic — reducible to something akin to an elixir, special sword, or slaying of one particularly vicious dragon. Given the complexity of our world, it is more about identifying and committing to that particular action we can take in a world infinitely bigger than us.
And it is better thought of as what remains when we dispense with the “super” prefix before “hero” — and replace it with what Stanford University professor Philip Zimbardo called the “ordinary” hero.
We all have the capacity for ordinary heroism and to embark on our hero’s journey. And the benefits can be heartening, indeed, when we do so in a way grounded in today’s reality.
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