We’ve all gone through it — the Brené Brown-ification of a “values-aligned” business.
Don’t even get me started on the countless health departments and hospitals “committed to mitigating health disparities” where 95% of the leadership are wealthy white women allergic to unions, cost-of-living raises, and paid family leave.
We’ve done the superficial “find your why” corporate icebreakers, only come to find out that the last four women of color and the last three chronically ill people have left under mysterious and abrupt circumstances — and you’re about to be the fifth.
(For legal reasons, this is a joke.)
And somehow (!) we find ourselves surprised to be four years into a pandemic without free tests or masks in sight, capitalism eating away at our sense of stability, watching multiple genocides unfold on our phones.
Literally everyone is plotting their disappearance to a teeny wood cabin with a flock of egg-laying hens and an always-strong sourdough starter and a patch of arugula in the backyard, right? It’s not just me scrolling Zillow?
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At best — at its most privileged — watching the breakdown happen is an annoyance, something we can shrug off at the end of a 9-5 day, on the subway ride home, turning towards a homecooked meal, a brisk walk with a cooped-up and over-delighted dog, and a hot water bottle tucked between the sheets.
At worst, though — which is to say, when we allow ourselves to feel the pain of it — it’s moral injury. It’s chronic trauma.
It’s soul loss.
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When the work stems from our actual lived values, when it is the work we might even do for free after the revolution, it flows. The priorities fall out on their own, protest is communal, discipline melts into devotion, abundance feels easeful.
It offers us delight, creativity, play. It is resonant, connective, compelling.
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In last week’s retrospective yearbook, I published Tulsi’s vision, mission, and values. They announced themselves out of a year of this work, shepherding others through their values, and finding the thread of my own.
What are your values? How present are they in your daily work and play?
When you dream, do you turn towards them? I'd love to hear.
