All Change Involves Death
Endless growth is a destructive myth
People love a good transformation story. The rags to riches tale. That nerd-to-hero movie. The sports team who started behind and made it all the way to the top. An underdog country in World War II that became a world superpower through grit and bravery.
Change and transformation can feel good, and they certainly can make for a compelling story. But change is not a simple process of mere improvement, as we are often told to believe. Most contemporary notions of change espouse the myths of endless, linear, unimpeded growth.
Worse yet, we pursue these kinds of changes, believing they will make us happier and more successful. We apply these myths of change to our personal lives, our businesses, our education, our technology, and our economy.
Consequently, these attitudes toward change and well-being generally lead to discontent and are linked to many of the issues attributed to consumer culture. These models of change that we have are all wrong. Sure they can demonstrate results in the short term. In fact, from our economic models to our personal models of change — the focus seems fixated on the short term.
We want to change our lives, and we want that change now! But we pay a high price for this kind of thinking — a debt paid into our troubled future.
Real, meaningful change is not about short-term quick fixes to our complicated lives. The kind of changes people need are often those that come with the most perturbation, uncertainty, and cost. James Baldwin wrote, “Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.”
If we are to create sustainable change in our lives, then we have to approach change in a realistic way. What do I mean by realistic?
Making a change in our lives means that something has to die!
Change and Death
Contemplating the relationship between our choices and death can be a troubling way to start this exploration. However, it is vitally important to consider the role death has on how we engage in meaningful change. Our life choices are made as our life is lived — a life that is moving in one direction. Forward. We only have so much forward before the end.
There is a close relationship between change and death. Think about it this way: all change involves loss, things given up, something exchanged. Always. Big life decisions or small, life is not simply a parade of additional things we are gaining. If we are gaining things then it also comes with things we may be letting go, things we are deciding not to pursue, things we are leaving alone.
It is no mistake that many ancient cultures and religions believed that the gods of creation were also the gods of entropy and destruction. Similarly, many shamans and witches understand that the world operates in a delicate balance. No magic can merely create something without something being given up in return. Nothing is gained without a price.
This has relevance in our contemporary world because, from this perspective, all change occurs within a closed ecosystem. There is an important symbiotic relationship going on here.
In contrast, most modern concepts of change simply see change as growth. Our stock markets, and the economies they represent, are built on the idea of endless growth. Many of our psychological models of personal change have this idea as well. They relish in the before and after photo that doesn’t consider a wider context.
As a result, we have constructed a consumer culture that often disregards any real cost to a given choice or behavior. We’ve grown addicted to progress, often for its own sake. Our innovative mantras in businesses often shout ‘can we’ but rarely ask ‘what will we lose by gaining this?’
As a result, the changes that are often made are superficial, transient, or down right dangerous. A company lays off a percentage of its workforce to make their Q4 look more profitable than it was. These are mere illusions of change we tend to create when we have little respect for the realities of lasting meaningful change processes.
The reality is change involves three equally important considerations:
exchange
limitedness
integration
As they say, nothing is free, and if a change is to be sustainable, it must consider (and respect) these forces within the interdependent world.
Vampiric Change
When our vision of change does not consider exchange, limitedness, and integration, we end up with unsustainable, monstrous versions of change. The first one I want to talk about is what I refer to as vampiric change.
The vampire mythos is centered on the undead — beings that are not alive but are not entirely dead. In other words, vampires violate the natural order — a creature out of the exchange with nature since all natural things die as part of the interconnected flow of life. Something outside of this cycle would disrupt the dynamic balance that nature provides.
While vampires do not exist, vampiric models of change do. Like vampires, this model of change does not consider exchange as a natural part of the change process.
What do I mean by exchange? Let me give you an example. If I want to hike more, then I will do at least one thing less. This exchange just makes sense. I can’t gain something without giving some other things up or at least doing something less. So maybe I have to give up some Netflix time in service of my goal of hiking more. These exchange processes help keep my newly found change balanced within the larger structures of my life. Quite simply — I can be on my couch watching Netflix and hiking at the same time.
This points to an important reason why sometimes we do not change — sometimes we don’t change because the price is too high. What we have to give up is an important consideration.
A common thing we have to give up in the service of change is our sense of certainty. We don’t know what is going to happen next. Anything we do that is truly novel means we have to let certainty die at that moment.
Let’s look at an example. In order to write more, perhaps, I have to let go of some of the fear of failure. Maybe I have to let die the narrative that “You aren’t good enough to write.”
Now it might seem silly to think I have to let go of the fear of failure. But by letting the fear of failure die, I invite a greater uncertainty into my life. And this can be uncomfortable. It can be challenging to let a known discomfort pass away and an unknown discomfort take its place.
In vampiric change, however, the emphasis is on feeding change without considering an exchange, the cost. It’s all consumed with gaining things without consideration to what things need to be let go, given up, or allowed to end. The costs of change are not considered. As a result, a great debt, so to speak, is accrued in the process.
We see this kind of change in forms of modern business and politics when leaders act in ways that suggest that they do not appreciate the interdependence of all beings or the inequities their greed induces. It is a method of change that grabs as much as you can and gives nothing in return.
And there is a great deal of temptation in this kind of change because it suggests that the change you want in your life is out there waiting for you to take it without any real cost.
Life-full Change Not Lifeless Change
Vampires are monsters because they have lost their humanity. For us humans, the beauty of life lies precisely in our eventual exchange of life with death.
Our life choices are meaningful because we can’t do it all; we can’t have it all. Our choices have consequences for ourselves and for others. We have to be responsible for our choices as a result. Therefore, we have to make committed choices toward what really matters in our lives!
And the costs of those choices are worth it if it aligns with our values. It produces meaningful change. If we approach change in a consumptive orientation, however, we will often experience a hollowed-out, lifeless change. These changes don’t feel worthwhile and often lead a person hungry for more.
Don’t be a Vampire: Our ever-evolving change process has to be connected to the world we live in. Exchange and interdependence are important considerations. Some questions to ask yourself:
What might I lose to gain what I want?
What kinds of exchanges might have to happen in order for this change to take place?
The changes I engage with will have impacts on those around me. Who will that be and how might it affect them?
Is the change I’m wanting bringing more meaning/vitality to my life or is it a lifeless pursuit?
Cancerous Growth
Exchange is one part of the change process we need to consider. Limitedness and integration are other important parts. Limitedness helps create boundaries to growth, whereas integration helps us stabilize changes happening over time.
Without limitedness and integration, we could change too quickly or inconsistently. Or the changes we have made might not settle into the larger ecology. And there is an unfortunate model of this in nature.
Growth without limits and integration is cancer.
Think about it. Cancer is growth. But it’s catastrophic growth because it is cellular growth that has evaded cellular death (limitedness) and extends itself without consideration of its own organism (integration) leading to damage over time. It has compromised its own organic system by extending and replicating its cellular structure too far. In other words, it has grown too much, too fast.
Unfortunately, the cancerous growth model extends well outside medical health. We see cancerous growth modeled everywhere in our economy. A person working in sales has a good quarter. We celebrate the win and then a stark realization — that a win for today is now the expectation for the future.
Businesses have to grow or, at the very least, appear like they are growing. The constant marching drum of ‘progress’ in this context leads some companies to behave poorly in the service of short-term profits. Corporations that have grown too large and lack proper integration within our economic ecology are considered ‘too big to fail,’ meaning that they are to be considered everlasting or limitless. This is cancerous growth at the economic level.
We see this modeled in our own personal lives too. I see all these articles about ‘biohacking’ and human ‘optimization.’ We are frantically trying to succeed through the ‘hustle’. You are either winning or you are losing. There seems to be sheer panic at the possibility that we will experience any form of decline as we age and so must vigorously deny such inevitability through consumer products that promise the miracle of anti-aging.
I’ve seen this in counseling contexts as well. A person is making some important changes to their life, and then they start to level off. Plateauing is a natural and expected part of the change process. Countless times when this happens, however, clients are bereft of the process, “why is this happening to me?”
Our psychological health requires time for rest and integration. We need time to stabilize new insights, habituate new behaviors, and practice new skills. But if our internal working model of change emphasizes growth as a linear, unending process — then we will suffer.
Allow for Integration and Stabilization: Change necessitates rest and reset. It also requires us to know our boundaries and limits. Pushing beyond what we can tolerate is the surest way toward injury. Ask yourself:
How am I supporting my growth?
Am I expecting too much, too quickly of myself or others?
Am I fueling these change processes with renewable resources?
How when I know I need to rest versus engage?
When will I know I have gone far enough or am I on an endless pursuit of more?
Building Sustainable Futures
Our expectations for growth and change must be mapped onto human life’s existential realities. From our economic policies to our personal growth goals, we need to appreciate the higher wisdom of nature.
Our expectations of change need to find a home in the soil of human existence. They have to make a relationship with the real boundaries of life. We certainly don’t want to be vampires or cancers to the world!
Nature demonstrates that sustainable growth is about exchange, limits, and integration within an interdependent environment. Our whole human life is one big production of these forces. If we seek a sustainable future, we are wise to respect and incorporate these forces into our plans for change. ∎