On Turning 30 in the Anthropocene

And just like that my 20s are over. Looking back, it seems I spent most of it chasing an ideal of success that taunted me like a mirage on the horizon. I had to get everything I could reasonably ask for in order to realize the deadness I felt inside was deeper, other than the longing for that ever-evasive idea of success.

In order to succeed, you dig into yourself. You dig out of yourself. You bring to the world what is inside. And you are promised that you will be refilled in turn. That your achievements will bring you fulfillment. And you believe the cold lump in the pit of your soul is because a success is aching to be realized. But our ambitions are so high and replenishing that we never get to prove that lie untrue.

And this trick works in our society — it keeps us unhappy. Not too unhappy as to be useless but just unhappy enough to keep us striving for that next thing marketing and messaging says will finally deliver us unto bliss. The perfect job, the perfect partner, a house, car, outfit, gadget… all brilliantly feeding into a system of consumption and extraction that requires vigilant mining of the soul.

My 20s changed and set the stage for my 30s when I began to see the trap. I was not being refilled. I was being depleted of all I was worth. My soul was being mined, and I was the one mining it. And as I got pushed up that golden, corporate ladder I felt emptier and emptier and frankly more terrified. It felt like dying.

The pit was still there, and it was growing, consuming me. I was told I would be ecstatic but the sadness and emptiness was all I felt. I wasn’t sad because my building of success couldn’t be considered splendid by some. I was sad because the whole foundation was wrong. Wrongly conceived, wrongly planned, wrongly built, and wrongly inhabited. It was a shrine to preposterousness. A flimsy and thus most unfitting monument to wholeness.

And I knew I had to change. Change it all from the roots. Redefine the goals and the rules and the players.

No one told me growth would feel like death. A whole system and a whole construction of you as a part of that system has to die.

Metaphors of metamorphosis are as old as time — but not enough is talked about the darkness of the cocoon where a caterpillar’s cells melt into a primordial soup. That is the death, before the long, difficult process of stitching your new self back together.

Valerie Kaur says “is this the darkness of the tomb or the darkness of the womb.” For me it was both.

Transformation doesn’t mean falling down and picking yourself back up. It’s being a forest not just a tree. You are both the fallen Sequoia, and the sapling bursting from its decay.

The hardest part is being a fully formed adult in one paradigm just to have your trunk chopped down at the roots to start all over with new rules, values, and ideas of success. To hold the memory of “having it all together” and then being born into a world where you are an infant in knowledge and practice.

But through this process something magical happened. I felt my soul come alive again. The soul that interrupted my focus in grad school to write and photograph and create and dream. The soul that I felt had died. But no, I started to sense it was in deep meditation. I could feel it. My hibernating soul. I could feel my need for it. My emotionless ache for it — because without it I couldn’t even really ache for the very thing I wanted. I was only numb. And so it was with a numb calculated acknowledgement, I nodded to my sleeping soul. And keen in its slumber it recognized I was ready to do the work — and started guiding me, subtly, subconsciously in the direction of the truth. I can’t tell you how I came to find the book Buddhist Economics but it called to me and began my journey. Although my journey had already begun. It began with Alan Watts. It began with Lab Girl and The Invention of Nature and Sapiens and Galapagos. My sly sleeping soul had been working all along. Like the somnambulist getting ready for work, like the quiet machines of the future that start the water boiling and the toaster ticking in preparation for the alarm.

At 30, I am left vulnerable and weak, but clear-eyed. Newly born, awake, hopeful, alive and full of gratitude.