How Dominant Narratives Prop an Inequitable System and Keep Changemakers Burned Out
I’ve been focused on a creative project for the past several months: I’m writing a book on how the dominant narratives around work and wealth leave us predisposed to burnout and despair. This is especially true if our jobs are to make progress on issues of peace, equality and justice.
A tweet last week by More Perfect Union uplifted a recent headline from Forbes that provides a great example of what I’m talking about: “Silver lining: The U.S. workforce has more employees over 65 than ever before and it could mean great things for the bottom line.”
We are barraged with narratives that center profits over people. From an early age, we are conditioned to think that our value lies in our labor, and in exchange we get “benefits” such as retirement and healthcare. And while the promise of those benefits appears to be shrinking – the headline above as just one example, with retirees increasingly told they should labor well into their golden years – our conditioning around work and wealth persists.
Take the idea that “bigger is better”. We’re conditioned to view success in terms of promotions, bigger departments, bigger budgets, and bigger paychecks, which finance bigger houses and bigger cars.
We’re taught that life is zero-sum – if I win, you lose. Our culture favors individuality, power and information over community, collaboration and imagination. It’s driven by fear to keep us feeling powerless, and it’s by design.
We’re told that changing how we work is too hard; that there’s an even playing field; that productivity is superior to creativity.
As individuals and mission-based organizations operating in the grips of this conditioning, how are we going to build a more equitable, safe and peaceful world for everyone? If we let our value be defined by our work outputs, and not our inherent value as humans, doesn’t it just prop the very system we want to fight?
And what about self-care? Can we really address stress and burnout without a critique of the system that drives it? How are perfectionism and imposter syndrome a result of our conditioning, and not just personality quirks or personal failures?
What’s more, how is the tendency to work predominantly in siloed issue campaigns just one symptom of work driven by these flawed narratives?
I’ll be thinking a lot about these topics in the coming months. I will lean heavily on Indigenous leadership, in addition to the scholarship of Black women, and women and people of color, to help show that our current thinking is flawed. They are leading the way out of a system defined by oppression.
I’m also considering starting a podcast – if you’d like to join a conversation about any of these topics, please reach out. (I’ve come to the conclusion that social media is not the best place to have authentic conversations for various reasons…I love the podcast format of in-person conversations.)
Finally, I want to bring this all back to how this project grew from my decades of communications work. It was actually borne out of frustrations that my work wasn’t having the impact I desired. It was the subconscious feeling that certain tactics didn’t feel quite right or authentic or effective in the face of increasingly dire headlines. I was always trying to find more resources or a brilliant strategy to counter hugely powerful corporate interests that were always going to outmatch advocates.
After facing my own 9-5 burnout and starting my consultancy, I came to realize that if our work is driven by dominant narratives based on fear and lack, it reinforces the very system we are trying to shift. For example, what if instead of always thinking in terms of wielding power and centering our efforts on “fighting” the bad thing, we devoted an equal amount of our attention to consciously unlearning our conditioning, shifting our mindsets, and creating new narratives that serve progress?
Don’t get me wrong: organizing does get the goods. But as a communications strategist, I’m biased: I believe we fail to devote equal attention to true narrative change.
And the narrative change we need starts with our individual thoughts. The new narratives won’t be market researched. They won’t come from PR firms. They will come from a conscious unlearning of what we believe to be true about work, survival, and wellbeing.
So, while I continue to work with organizations on strategic communications, I will be dedicating large amounts of my time to conversations about how dominant narratives keep us burned out and in despair – and how we can develop new narratives, build new ways to do the work, and consciously create the future we want to see. Sign up below if you’d like to stay informed as my work on this develops.