San Diego GreenLife

Copyright Laura Silver

I was intrigued by a comment I heard on a radio show about retirement planning a while back. The guest said it that was impossible to determine how much money to plan for unless you had some idea of what would make you happy in retirement—that most people tended to look for a dollar amount in a vacuum, not really connecting it to themselves or thinking about what really gives them satisfaction.

Somehow my weirdly-wired brain linked that comment with environmentalism, consumer culture, our fast-paced world, my long-ago days as a paramedic, and frequently-heard complaints of feeling disconnected—from people, nature, and ourselves. With any luck, I’ll be able to make it clear why.

It’s a conundrum of no mean complexity how a society that spawned the “me generation” and the ubiquitous, (and only half-ironic), “it’s all about me” joke, is chockablock with folks who don’t know themselves well enough to decide what might make them feel happy or satisfied.

Consumerism tells us money, and the things it can buy, will alleviate our anxiety and malaise. If the latest cell phone doesn’t make you feel better, try a movie, nightclub, TV show, extreme sport—anything to take you out of yourself.

Yet I suspect what is needed is to get more into ourselves—in a profound, less narcissistic way.  I see clear evidence that this is true in the rising paradigm that includes “green thinking”.

Environmentalism stresses reconnecting with nature; realizing that we are a part of everything around us. But if we do, it soon becomes clear that “everything” is more than just plants, animals, water and earth. Everything includes other people, and ultimately our “self” as part of that whole. We cannot strive to reconnect, to heal the whole without working to become whole ourselves.

For various and complex reasons, American society tends to fragment us, keeps us focused outward on a myriad of distractions that range from the trivial to those of apparent significance. It’s true that people who are not whole are more controllable by outside forces—and maybe that is part of what underlies the direction our society has taken—but there is good evidence that we are beginning to take it back.

The paradigm that includes green thinking is reflected in the people we see leaving corporate America to work at things that make less money, but afford them true satisfaction. It is the driving force behind Fair Trade, Spiritual Capitalism, and Ethical Investing.

That money cannot buy happiness is so old a saw that its blade is dull. What people are beginning to realize is that money cannot buy meaning, and the satisfaction that comes with believing you are something other than a faceless cog in an unfeeling machine.

When I came out of the medical field into the business world I was nearly laid flat by a one-two punch: all at once I lost the feeling that what I did mattered, and that the people I worked with were a team, with a commitment to something beyond their next paycheck. Business just didn’t work that way, and I was at sea.

But it turns out plenty of people were out there on the ocean with me. As the paradigm began to shift to one where being connected meant more than having a cushy spot in the old-boy-network, people started to look for connections that gave them true satisfaction and a sense of purpose.

Studies of the human brain have shown that we are hard-wired to seek meaning. Given a series of random facts, ideas, or circumstances the brain will immediately attempt to relate them, even if it has to construct something rather odd and empirically unsupportable to do it. The brain cannot rest until it has cataloged, related, or discarded the input and created some kind of synthesis.

It seems to me to follow that, on a broader level, we can never feel whole without having a sense that who we are, and what we do, has some kind of meaning. I don’t think it matters if the basis of it is brain physiology or something more metaphysical.  A sense of meaning cannot exist in a vacuum—it is expressed through interrelatedness, through connections to people, ideas, to nature, and the universe around us.

Saving the earth isn’t accomplished by cleaning up a beach, going solar, or buying a hybrid vehicle. Those are the outward expressions of the more profound change we’re already making to who we are, and how we relate to the “everything” around us.

As we look at how to be more green, we perforce look inward at the whole complex of what affords us meaning, because it is all connected. If we become whole and begin to heal, so will the earth.