The Life I Want: healing loneliness and burnout
The collective work ahead, and an invitation to join our next community call
As the U.S. presidential election results started to trickle in earlier this month, CNN commentator and longtime activist Van Jones reflected on how a lot of people were feeling hurt and scared. “There’s a moral victory and a political victory, and they’re not the same thing,” Jones said.
Like Jones and so many others, we wanted a much more dramatic repudiation of the outgoing administration. But the lack of moral victory also provided clarity on the collective work we need to do, which is very much aligned with The Life I Want. Our aim is to both reimagine work so that it works for our lives individually, and work together toward a future that supports our lives collectively—a future where we embrace racial justice, health and care, economic recovery, climate stability, and equity.
In this newsletter, we’re sharing a few stories that show a path forward.
The first step is looking within, and working to heal ourselves. Christine interviewed Serena Bian, who experienced severe isolation her first year at college. Her healing journey became a mission to end loneliness: from the “Space Gatherings” she launched on her college campus to bring students together for authentic conversations, to working with tech entrepreneurs building community, to learning from leaders such as organizational psychologist Adam Grant and former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who profiled her in his book Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World. Most recently, working on the Biden-Harris campaign, she saw how the political differences she experienced in her own family are projected and reflected across the nation. Now Bian aims to end something larger than loneliness: She wants to rewrite the American norms that prize self-reliance, toward a more community-oriented ethos.
The next step is looking at community—the best antidote to loneliness. Christine profiled Diana Riggs and Todd Severson, who created Mac Market, a community gathering space in Christine’s hometown of McMinnville, Oregon. The couple spent two years driving around in an Airstream, cat and aging golden retriever in tow, until they found just the right place to land. As luck would have it, their new community had the perfect old building for them create a new space that brings community together. The decline of community institutions is exacerbating isolation and social divides, and places like Mac Market are essential in building connection at the local level.
Moving outward from ourselves and our communities, the next step is to recognize and name the systems that are harming us, which Anne Helen Petersen does in her new book, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. Like Bian, Petersen first noticed burnout in herself and her peers, and from there she looked outward to understand the larger forces at play. Her book holds up a mirror so we can clearly see the systems we must change. In her conversation with Eva, she explained how the pandemic has exposed our broken systems. Now that all eyes are on the problems, Petersen says we have a narrow window of time to fix them—and she issues a call to action for us to do so.
If you’re interested in the collective work toward a better future, we’d love to have you join us for our next Life I Want community Zoom conversation Tuesday, December 8, 2 p.m. Pacific / 5 p.m. Eastern (9 a.m. December 9 Australian Eastern Daylight Time). Just fill out this short form to sign up and tell us what you want to get out of this call. If you can’t make this one but want to join a future call, or have other ideas for how to build this community, we’re all ears: hello@thelifeiwant.co.
If you’re receiving this for the first time, or if someone forwarded it to you, a warm welcome. You can see all of our blog posts here, and read about this project here.
A few of our favorite recent reads and listens:
Christine was catching up on her Amherst College alumni magazines, and this essay by Chloe McKenzie about financial trauma completely blew her mind.
Season 3 of Katherine Goldstein’s The Double Shift podcast is underway, and the addition of Angela Garbes as co-host is fantastic (and that’s not just Christine’s Filipina half talking).
Anne Helen Petersen’s new media project, Culture Study, is like a real-time sequel to her book, offering subscribers access to an online community of others galvanized to work toward a better future.
Ryan Park wrote a beautiful tribute about his time clerking for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who inspired him to become a stay-at-home dad. The most important advice he got from the former Supreme Court justice? “Be a good partner” and “take breaks.”
On the fiction front, Christine loved Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid. Eva has been dipping into poetry with a selection put together by Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly in his new book, Love is Strong as Death.
With gratitude,
Eva & Christine