Finding Your Place in a Burning World

The point of this article
is to focus on making a difference now.

To get our bearings, we need to make gloves-off, real-world assessment of the way things are now: and the world is burning. Economically, politically, ecologically, and socially, things are falling apart and burning down. But these problems aren't new. They've existed in their current form for at least the past two centuries. We can look back to the work of Emile Durkheim on anomie and how social isolation caused suicide. We can look back to the work of Karl Marx calling out the problems of capitalism. We can look back to the works of Alexander von Humboldt, who acknowledged the ecological impacts of humanity on the natural world. The world may be burning, but this isn’t the first time people have noticed.

How to Find Your Place
In a Burning World

To respond, we need to develop a plan that puts us in a frame of mind focused on what we can do in the present; not only on what is important to us, but on how to engage with the world around us. The steps we can take here lead to finding your place in a burning world. First, find your values. What's actually important to you? These should be your own; they should be intentional and conscious, not thoughts that have been imposed on you by society, but beliefs that actually resonate with your own way of being. Second, based on this, find your cause. What are you actually passionate about? What do your values lead you to believe and find important? What cause can you reliably and intentionally engage with without immediately burning out?

Third, find your community. Where are the people who are actually passionate about what you believe? Who shares your values? Who shares your cause? Inevitably, there are people around who have commonalities with you. Leverage this to make an impact in the world. Fourth, find your partner. Find a person or a few people who share your community, cause, and values, but who can more directly engage with your work and give you honest, critical feedback in a way that wouldn't be practical to share at a community level. Finally, find your place. This can mean your physical place in the world, as well as your place in society. Where around the world are you best situated to make an impact? Perhaps that’s where you grew up and what you're familiar with, but it could also be somewhere across the world. Think about things like sustainability. If you feel called to Mozambique, maybe living in China isn't the best place. Or, maybe it is. Maybe the social connections you make there are incredibly valuable, even if the flights are long.