The World We Inherited
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
We live inside a world built on extraction, depletion, and erasure. A world where the many labor so the few may accumulate, where people are asked to give more, be more, produce more — until they can no longer remember what “enough” feels like. Most people sense this. Some give it a name like “the economy,” or “the way things are,” or “just life.” Many complain and still hand over their time, their attention, their effort — sometimes until it hurts, and then a little more. Eventually they learn to tolerate the slow erosion of their own being until they forget the way back to themselves.
This isn’t a modern phenomenon, it’s too ingrained, too deep a groove to be recent. Since we left hunting and gathering behind for agriculture, we’ve been trying to fill an inner abyss of existential vulnerability — the belief that nature would never be enough, that its rhythms were too wild to trust. We left our relationship to the seasons for a life spent trying to control them.
We built systems to soothe our fear — systems that created the illusion of stability, and then more systems on top of those, until the scaffolding itself became our sense of security. Concepts like ownership, wealth, industry, government, and risk management emerged as substitutes for trust in nature, and we dragged them with us through history straight into the fabric of our individual lives.
A new reality divided us into ‘haves’ and ‘have‑nots,’ shaping our sense of connection and belonging – and our ideas about safety and security – for thousands of years. To be in the “haves” category, we went to work, but rarely asked what we are working for. We recited the practiced answers — to make a living, to retire comfortably, to provide for a family. These seemed like reasonable reasons, just as they were in ancient times – to prepare for a future we could not see, a winter where we might not have enough.
But beneath it all, something quieter scratched at the door of our psyche, asking us why we’re tolerating the pace and the pull of attention and the constant pressure to buy, optimize, perform, and empty ourselves in the name of a life we never chose.
Now, we rarely hear that quiet scratch. It’s buried under fear, urgency, and the feeling that there’s never enough time in our finite lives — only the pressure to keep up. When we do hear it, we ignore its insistent nagging questions about our decisions and actions. We turn away from its ask for us to look deeper, beyond the widening cracks in the controlled façade.
If we could listen and see, we might realize that our fear pushes us toward the illusion of control and that the whole system we created and complexified stays alive by keeping itself at the center of our attention – feeding us niggling, incessant doubts just to sell us the solutions for their relief. We might even see the toll it takes on our felt sense of being itself.
Some do listen, do look deeper, past the existential crisis that drives the need to control, to see the system for what it is. They see it because it stares them in the face every day, because they can’t leave its urgency at the desk in the office. They try, but urgency is the louder voice in the sea of chaos — and when it goes unheeded, it threatens to tear everything apart. Frustration and resentment then become the norm, ruts that harden into an exhaustion no vacation can touch.
The deep grooves of the system trap them in ancient conditioning – to stop is laziness, to rest is failure. As soon as they try to break free, it pulls them back into the well-worn track, convincing them they’re better off staying in line. And every day they set aside their real self and a life they’d prefer to live. Every day they face a question: continue to let it bury the core of their being even deeper — or reclaim the solid ground of their own lives.