Living in a world built on loss

The cost of consuming outrage

An interesting thing about Substack is discovering what people are willing to pay for, and stop paying for.

Many readers are paying for an interpretation of the latest thing. They want someone to explain what a political event means, what a public figure’s latest outburst signifies, which is the latest health scam, or which system is wronging society. These are important events and topics but they can suck up algorithmic attention more than the middle ground, reflective pieces that intend to educate through facilitating insight than imposing and persuading a perspective. Algorithms notice what captures attention and reward the tricks that keep people looking, clicking, commenting and sharing. We just love strong opinions that we already agree with and some are willing to pay for it.

There is an endless market for analysis of people who are chronically online, frothing at mouth and saying the craziest things to stoke their attentionometer. I think some people await events so that they can talk about it endlessly either through validating their predictions of the harmful ‘other side’ or confirming the righteousness of their side.

Photo by G Creates on Unsplash

Humans love drama. Drama is stimulating as it gets our blood boiling, our passion erupting, and we live for it. We can’t help but see the world through one of the roles of the Dreaded Drama Triangle. It’s our default lens and it makes us feel alive to participate in a conversation about an event and to feel that it’s somehow tied to our daily life or makes us feel more significant to have a take on the event.

I’ve experienced a few heavy losses recently and that has made me shut out the world a little bit while observing the world continue to turn. I’ve been seeing through it. While these events seem really important and there’s a pressure to have thoughts and feelings about these events because somehow they make a difference to how the grand scheme of things unfold, or so we think, they don’t have more significance or less significance than all the other losses I experience in day to day life, which is kind of my point. I live a life that constantly experiences loss, yet I don’t talk about the small and constant losses. I would rather focus on the impersonal and transpersonal losses, as if somehow that gives me a sense of power to change or prevent them, rather than focus on and grieve the losses that occur every single day.

We live lives filled with loss yet we rarely speak about it. We focus on the large-scale tragedies and catastrophes because they might seem safer to rage about. They keep us from having to face the losses that belong to us.

Not that I want to read about people’s little losses in another aggrieved essay. I’m really talking about the things that suddenly or gradually drop out of our lives that are normal but also devastating.

Some of those losses include:

• The loss of loyalty to a political side.

• Loss of an identity.

• Loss of freedom to go out at night in any neighbourhood.

• The loss of a sense of safety or community.

• Loss of quiet because everything beeps at us.

• Loss of privacy.

• Loss of trust, even among friends.

We can’t possibly keep up with the rate of loss, so we focus on gains, small wins, distractions. When we remain oblivious to our losses and don’t mourn them, they accumulate in our psyche, erupting as hostility, outrage, and unhinged comments directed at strangers online.

Some of what I would describe as Cluster B behaviour is simply what distress can look like when too many losses have gone unmourned. The Cluster B behaviour I’ve seen pop up in some close relationships of normally emotionally stable people are signs of distress from unmourned losses.

The things I see on social media are a collective cry of despair under the guise of justice, moral posturing, strong conviction, and certainty.

The losses go beyond the things we’ve actually lost. We are grieving the collapse of the fantasy we were promised about how life should be. We aim for a better future, which we are actually living, but that progress is accompanied by the fruits of decisions that eroded social trust. The fantasy is interrupted by wars, corruption, mass violence, betrayals of public trust, and private disappointments. Each disruption cracks the illusion that life can be smooth and predictable if we just work hard enough or hold the right beliefs.

I’m not speaking only about geopolitics. In our workplaces, where many of us spend most of our waking hours, there are constant disappointments and betrayals in the form of withheld promotions, mishandled investigations, rewarded scapegoating, protected incompetence, and institutional cowardice. Each of these moments is a small puncture in the already false belief about fairness in the system. Together, they reflect and reinforce the lowered social trust that many people experience.

So it’s easier to project that grief outward than acknowledge it. We cut each other down to feel momentarily in control and powerful. The more the losses accumulate, the more frantic we become in asserting that our version of reality is the right one.

Each time we glimpse evil, something inside us breaks. We lose another bit of innocence, a slice of faith that humanity is redeemable. Evil’s intent is to divide us, so the more we consume of it on our feeds, the more we’re marked by it. We are not designed to ingest horror on demand, yet we scroll on.

Our sense of safety is challenged along with our relationship with reality itself. This can cause anyone who is unaware of this rupture to withdraw trust, increase suspicion, and become less convinced that anyone is acting in good faith. To compensate for this uncertainty, certainty hardens along with defensiveness and attachment to explanations that restore a sense of order, even if they’re delusional.

The loss of innocence and naiveté is also the loss of a way of seeing the world. What’s now seen can’t be unseen.

A persistent distorted worldview founded on a suspicious belief system and attached to a fantasy version of reality can cause people to swing between denial and obsession, clinging to a version of reality that no longer exists, a fantasy past they never lived, or a utopian future. Others become consumed by what they have discovered. One refuses to acknowledge reality while the other sees nothing else.

Perhaps this is why so much public discourse feels increasingly disconnected from ordinary life. People aren’t simply arguing about facts but are struggling to reconcile the gap between the world they believed they inhabited and the world they now perceive. The argument is rarely about the argument and is more often about a reality that has already been lost.

It’s not only what we see, but also what we say. The Jewish concept of lashon hara reminds us that speaking ill of another person, even when it is true, has a spiritual cost. Online, lashon hara is everywhere. We’re not absolved of the consequences of speaking vile things about someone just because we disagree with them, neither are witnesses. The person being spoken about absorbs some of that negativity unless they have built enough spiritual strength to repel it. I’m not being metaphorical as I’m describing a circulation of harm that touches everyone involved.

There are things in this world that deserve condemnation and behaviour that deserve to be called out for what they are. My concern is with what happens when our attention is shaped around these things to the point that they begin shaping how we see reality itself. The more we immerse ourselves in evil, the more likely we are to become marked by it. The injury is carried through what we witness and through repeated participation in cycles of outrage, contempt, humiliation and division.

I believe we’re facing a collective spiritual injury. We’re harmed by what we see, by what we say, by what we participate in when we turn each other into enemies to soothe our own pain.

At some point we have to decide what we want more: another fight, another turn on the dreaded drama triangle ride, or the hard, discrete work of mourning. If we’re serious about peace, we have to stop feeding the spectacle. We have to grieve what we have lost and recover the strength to resist reenacting the game of division.

The moral high ground has been overdone and subverted. There is none. There’s duty to each other and a vision that those who would rather belong in spiteful misanthropic groups will someday be shaken out of their spell so they can breathe in humanity again. Most spells eventually run out of power. We have an open invitation to look inward and reflect on the state of our own minds and spirits. If you believe in God, or in a higher order of meaning, then the task is not to win arguments but to become clear enough for something greater to work through you. We can’t do that when we’re reactive and focused on being right. Ego inflation hijacks the very capacities we need for discernment, duty, long-range thinking.

The work is to become aware enough to act in alignment with something larger than our own reactivity without needing to withdraw from the world. It’s what makes responsible action, dharma, possible.

Peace might begin with accepting that some things have already been lost because reality has moved and we have not moved with it. Mourning is how we catch up and how we stop fighting for worlds that no longer exist.

What reality are you still fighting to preserve that has already changed?

What loss has been asking to be mourned?

Thanks for reading,

Nathalie

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