Something Like A War
Something Like a War
“The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.”
― Stephen Ambrose
The world is changing in ways we are not always ready for. Our personal lives are often in a constant state of change, pivoting, and anxiety; hopping from rock to rock to navigate life, managing busy schedules, and making the most of the time we have. We experience seasons of consistency, but not always. Many days, the weight of the world is heavy. Seasons of difficulty, transition, or monotony can punctuate our experience or redefine what tomorrow will bring. In the 21st century, we see an abundance of anxiety, scarcity, fear-mongering, and misanthropy, as well as technology transforming human value. With an eye on the future and a disconnected path to get there, many people are struggling through the current era, looking for hope and connection; a way to reach the human flourishing that is marketed to us across our experience.
When we look at the world around us, it’s not confusing that the global experience is full of trouble. Armed conflicts, refugees moving from one country to another, economic disruption, political complications, and differences of opinion from anything from TV shows to watch to what church to go to. In today’s cultural landscape, we experience constant volatility across all these spaces. We seem to find less peace, less unity, less harmony, and less human flourishing in the day-to-day. In response, people are willing to embrace a variety of ideas under the banner of hope for the future. Our experience is mixed with predictions of AI influence, transformations of our work, play, and purpose, and a hybrid existence where technological interaction and digital experience are integrated into our daily lives.
While there are many battles to be had and new ways of doing things that push us to grow, along with the rapid expansion of our understanding that incorporates processes we need to learn — we end up racing toward a future we’re not quite sure what it will be when we get there. For many, this kind of future is exciting. For others, they look at human factors and the effects it will have on the people who live through these times. The community of the 21st century is brimming with promise, but it’s unclear how it will be realized and who will be left on the side of the road as it progresses. Whether we like it or not, we are living in such a time as this.
Connecting to the World Around Us
One of the foundational realities we have as human beings is that we all have a value basis that informs how we live, how we think, and what we do. In a holistic sense, we call this a worldview. Everyone has a worldview; everybody has a way that they look at the world and process what’s going on around them. They understand who they are, where they came from, what they’re supposed to do in this world, what that means for future generations, and what happens after they’re gone. In the Western world, many people live inside a syncretic worldview where they’ve compiled information, understanding, and perspectives through subjective truths. Their lives are often marked by personal application of these ideologies, and a bespoke interpretation of the world around them.
On the heels of postmodernism, where we challenged every authority over us and deconstructed the world to fit our bespoke understanding, many people are now oscillating between elements they used to trust and new ideas they’re leaning on to find peace in an ever-changing world. We call this metamodernism. It’s an idea where you determine value and oscillate between pieces of truth, bits of perspective, and realities that you determine. In a world without consistency, it seems the only reasonable way to go forward.
The complication to that reality, quite simply, is objective truth. The idea that there are things that are true, whether we believe in them or not. You can use whoever’s idea to support a conclusion, but as John Adams once said, “Facts are stubborn things.” This has made the 21st century something like a war. An ideological war, a battle of semantics, and a battlefield of nuance; a conflict, steeped in anxiety, amplified by stress, and talked about ad nauseam because of the ubiquity of technology. The reality of objective truth is that people have value, and that will never change as long as people live in this world. Whatever opinion shuffles humanity to lower levels of importance has lost the plot on the objective truth of the world we live in and the purpose that impacts every life on the planet.
The Cost of the Future
As we look to the future, many are seeing a lack of humanity: a digital infrastructure of technological advancement that reduces decisions to cold, hard logic and changes metrics into isolated, data-inferred conclusions. The complication to this is that people are caught in the middle. Much of this digital world was not made for human flourishing. It is as if it were made for human diminishment. Tech visionaries see a world where humans aren’t important, and technology reigns supreme. It is a future where a few oligarchic tech barons make decisions for the masses and then tell them those decisions are really the best things for them. The arrogance is deafening. The ignorance is appalling. The indifference is a pill to be swallowed as they march on for their own benefit. People are less of an invaluable source of impact and more of a commodity of human capital, a line on the P&L to be reconciled against greater ambition.
One place where this has reared its ugly head is in the workplace. Through the ages, work has been identified as a whole lot of things: some of them are better, some are worse, some have been oppressive, and some have brought purpose. One of the objective truths that marks our humanity is that work was meant to be something good. It was meant to be something that we could do to bring goodness into our world. That may sound strange in a culture that elevates play, consumerism, and entertainment as the pinnacle of the good life. But, believe it or not, work is one of the secret rewards of a life lived well — where impact goes much farther beyond the labors of one’s hands.
As we wrestle through what that means in our daily lives, we have to give the purpose of work its due. For the entirety of human history, human flourishing is connected to work more than anything else. So what happens to that spirit of flourishing, and the value of people, when the future forecast is for technology to take over that work and leave people to find their meaning in other places? Quite simply, it’s disastrous. We see that in the workplace of the 21st century. A number of corporate C-suites have determined that people are an unimportant factor in their business. People don’t have value. Machine-driven metrics and analysis have reduced the most worthy thing in our world to a number on a balance sheet, a unit of currency, and a correlating cost. This philosophy has left a mark on the post-COVID economy, where millions of people in the workforce are living in the wake of a reality that statistics no longer identify.
Imagine a scenario, if you will: Soldiers storming the beaches of Normandy, leaving their troop carriers to rush up a beach, watching friends and others get blown to bits, while looking for the safety of shelter as they charge forward toward impending doom. They are shell-shocked by the fallout all around them. They try to go from point A to point B, but they’re losing their bearing. They need someone telling them to keep moving forward, but that voice has just become a memory. They look around and see others who don’t know where to go or what to do. Just keep going forward. Just hope that this isn’t the end. In making it across the beach, someone else takes over, giving them a new mission so they can advance again into the fire. There is no time to process, just the need to be grateful they are still here. Refocus, repeat, storm another beach, and be in the middle of more human fallout. Of course, PTSD sets in.
On a long enough timeline, survival rates go to zero, and attrition rates go beyond 100%. While many people in our society have no real idea of that experience (like a World War II hero does), a wide cadre of people know those exact feelings from surviving in their workplace as bombs go off all around them and in their companies. Don’t hang on too tight, refocus on the work, pretend things are okay, and don’t get too hung up on what happened or when it will happen again. The top brass will move forward as if it was just a normal part of growth. But it isn’t. The fallout is all around. Online communities try to connect and help, but recovery is needed. No aid station for those still in the battle, just some blinders to keep their eyes looking down the road.
For many people today, it’s something like a war. PTSD is settling in. Beat down, tired, fearful, alone, depleted energy reserves, destroyed sleeping patterns, and a constant state of duress, as well as fractured relationships. Marshaling any objective just to stay afloat in a world out of control. These people manage smiles when their hearts are breaking. They rally hope as they shake hands for new deals that may never come to fruition. They stir their excitement for new opportunities, even when they are ghosted after six interviews by a new company rattling off how great their culture is. This is what we’ve done to work in the 21st century. It is a battleground we approach with a fake persona, thriving in a war that seems like everyone is losing. The time has come to turn the tide and bring human flourishing back to the forefront.
The Future We Build Together
So what do we do? How can we cope? How do we build a future that we want rather than one that we fear? Is there a place where human flourishing isn’t some technologists’ reinvention of humanity into a hybrid reality? Well, I believe there are two answers: one is subjective, and the other is objective. One is something we can do, and the other is someone we can seek.
First, the subjective answer: we need to make people matter. Give people the value they are due. Build relationships and encourage people. Be a connector. Be a networker. Be someone who helps the people around you, in any way that you can. Sit with a friend who’s going through a rough time. Take them out for lunch. Give them a recommendation. Use your network to connect with people in your community who are hurting. Don’t just let it slide; show up for them. Personally, if you need a coach, get one; if you need to grow skills, work at it. Don’t shrink back; be empowered to engage with others and share what you can do until you can do more.
The objective worldview carries a very different understanding into our world. Reality as it truly is knows a purpose that transcends the circumstances of the day and flourishes people for all eternity. The truth of that reality is a world of principalities and powers battling in a war behind the scenes. It has victories of the heart, transformations of the mind, empowerment through the spirit, and a reservoir of strength for the soul. The hope that the truth claims to is not a human hope, but orients each human toward the value that they have and restores them to the life they were intended to live.
If you’re someone who’s walking through the season of difficulty, feeling the Shell shock or the PTSD of a cruel world that diminishes our humanity, click here to find out more about what a transformed life can look like. It took work to provide a path for our restoration, and we bear the image of the One who created us for that purpose. As David Bahnsen says, “Work is a part of who we are by creation.” Both the work and the worker are important to the One who made us to make an impact in this world. Our identity is connected to work, so much of the meaning we derive in life comes from our work.
The reality of our experience in this life is that it will always have ups and downs; it will have transitions, scarcity, and overwhelming circumstances. When you find yourself in the war, reach out to someone you trust, someone you respect, or someone who can help. If you see someone with workplace PTSD, take the time to engage them, advocate for them, and lift their spirits in ways that are real. Frederick Buechner says that in this life “lending each other a hand when we fall may be the only work worth doing in the end.” If you have people around you who need a hand, give it to them. Help those you can. Listen to them, be empathetic, and share your humanity with them in a time when everything around them might be covered with sound and fury. Help them find faith for the future, and in the process revitalize the value of humanity along the way.
Thank you to the many men and women who have served our country, enduring impossible things that have provided a future for so many. If anyone has PTSD, don’t hesitate to get in touch with a worthy organization like CTHC and others.
