I used to be addicted to the news. Seriously addicted.
Every morning, every evening, and then news radio in the car on top of it. Scrolling, reading, listening, watching. Always informed. Always outraged. Always exhausted. It was destroying me, along with all my other addictions at the time.
So I switched it off. For years I stopped following the news entirely. Politics? Figure it out yourselves. Not my thing anymore.
That worked. For a while.
But lately it’s different. My partner tells me things. I can’t scroll past it on social media. And so I notice I’m looking at what’s happening in the world more often again.
With a little fear too, what if it pulls me back in?
But what I know now that I didn’t know then: that outrage, that powerlessness, that feeling of meaninglessness, nobody benefits from it. Not me, not the people around me.
And yet looking away completely isn’t the answer either.
Because the people who are right in the middle of that world, they need you and me. Not to stand at the front and rile up a crowd. But to bring a little more peace to our own environment.
It’s about knowing, without letting it consume you. And asking yourself: where do I actually have influence?
How evil begins
Not with monsters. That would be easier.
Phil Stutz cites in his book True and False Magic a journalist who saw Hitler just before a speech in 1933. She was standing a few meters away from him and thought: this is him? That small, hunched little man in the corner?
Until he was announced.
Suddenly a completely different person. Upright. Imposing. The room exploded. And after the speech? A little mouse again.
Stutz says something like: he wasn’t even himself. He was a vessel. The evil wasn’t in him. It moved through him, because he had long since stopped feeling.
That’s the pattern.
Pain hardens you. Uncertainty becomes conviction. The other person slowly becomes less human.
Barry Michels calls this, borrowing from William Blake, the fearful symmetry. What is done to us, we pass on. To others. To future generations. Unless we consciously choose not to.
What energy do you bring into the world?
Michael Singer says something like: if you’re yelling at your loved ones at home or raging about all the misery in the world, you’re creating a war yourself. In your own house.
And it doesn’t even have to be loud. Sometimes it’s just silence. The cold war at home. Everyone doing their own thing with no real connection. That’s also energy we send into the world.
And about the activist who out of rage sets a car on fire to save the environment: you’re polluting the environment more than that car ever could have.
I had to laugh and felt sick at the same time when I read that.
The big starts in the small
As a coach I see this every day in people who seem to be functioning just fine. Busy surviving, performing, being on the right side, while slowly losing themselves on the inside.
Reducing others to an opinion. Another camp.
Not bad people. Ordinary people.
The big starts in the small. In you, in me, in the choice we make every day.
Do I become harder, or do I stay human?
Where our influence actually lies
Barry Michels tells the story of a civil rights leader in Nashville, 1960. America was on fire. Race riots. Violence in the streets. Everyone was choosing a side.
Reverend James Lawson was training young activists in nonviolent protest. One day he came face to face with an enraged man in the crowd.
The man spits full in his face. Hate in his eyes.
Lawson calmly wipes it off. Looks at him.
And asks if he has a motorcycle.
The man, completely thrown off, says yes. They start talking. About motorcycles, horsepower, how to tune them. Two men who for a moment are no longer enemies, just two people with a shared passion.
Slowly the hate disappears from the man’s face.
And eventually he asks: can I do anything for you?
That’s what Michels calls Goodness. Not naive. Not weak. But the conscious choice to keep seeing the human being behind the hate. To not go along with the logic of camps and enemies.
Don’t retaliate. Don’t harden. Don’t numb out. Don’t look away.
Keep seeing the other person as human, especially when everything invites you not to.
I don’t have a solution for how the world works.
But I know where my influence lies. Not with the people firing rockets. With the people around me. At home. On the street. In my community. In the people I help.
That’s where it starts.
I believe that sending love works. “Love sent is love felt,” as Barry Michels so beautifully said. And so I try to take a breath and send love to the other person before I react. It doesn’t always work, but more often than before.
Smile at a stranger. Pick up a fallen bike. Throw away something that isn’t yours. Send love to people you sense are in pain.
That’s where I start. Every single day. Small things. But they count.
When did you last truly see someone, beyond their opinion, beyond their appearance, beyond their camp? What did that do to you?
