Right Livelihood in the "Metacrisis"

Are You Doing Your Good Work?

Greetings everyone, and especially to the many new subscribers in the last few weeks.

This newsletter is where I present my observations about what I call “Good Work”: a version of the traditional Buddhist concept of “Right Livelihood” updated and adapted to our modern times.

Coming out of the long holiday weekend — which I have spent with family and friends here in Boulder, enjoying lots of great soccer in the European Championship (and some less than great soccer in the Copa America) — my sense of commitment and inspiration are really bursting.

For a number of reasons, I’m feeling a growing urgency to help people discover and perform the professional work that is most deeply rewarding for them.

I am pretty sure that at some level most everyone is feeling this urgency too. There is the well-documented malaise in the global workforce, but more importantly there is a growing realization that we — humanity — are in the midst of a “metacrisis” that has, amongst other disruptions, radically transformed the terms which govern our professional contracts. By “contracts” here I mean quite literally the promises of exchange between employers, employees, clients and markets…. as well as the more overarching sense of our Sacred Contract with Work.

(If you are unfamiliar with the concept of the “metacrisis,” I highly recommend the work of Daniel Schmachtenberger, who is uncommonly lucid and heartfelt in his observations. A good brief summary of the term can be found on the Reality_Studies Substack.)

The volatility of the metacrisis affects everybody. Knowledge workers, tech workers, health care professionals, lawyers, non-profit workers, founders, executives, social enterprises, entrepreneurs …. everybody.

The metacrisis is rapidly disrupting the structures that support those things that make our work meaningful: financial reward, exercise of skills, beneficial impact on others, connection with supportive communities, exploring our interest areas, and alignment with our deepest values.

If you find these things in your work now, congratulations! but you must know that all institutions and structural systems for all professional work are right now radically changing. Nothing is guaranteed. Your “job security” is just an idea in your head, and your position may evaporate in an instant.

For the large majority, research shows that most people who have jobs are NOT doing fulfilling work, and/or have recently been laid off from work (that may or may not have been very fulfilling anyway.)

For those people — most of us — this moment is a great opportunity to find and develop the work-in-the-world that is most fulfilling to us personally. It is, I believe, the best opportunity we have ever faced in our lifetimes, and depending on where the macrotrends go with respect to your chosen profession and location (i.e. whether you are more affected by old system collapses or new emergent systems), it may be the best opportunity we will ever have.

The opportunity is two-fold. First, it is a time for you to actually clarify for yourself what is most important to you in your Work. Some people put financial reward at the top of their list, others put value alignment or impact.

But let’s back up a step …. do you even know what your values are, and what alignment looks like? The answer for most people is no. We kind of default into certain work and career paths that support our lives in certain ways, but most people haven’t done the discernment of establishing what is most important to us, and how we want to honor it in our Work.

As I’ve talked about extensively in this newsletter, on LinkedIn and in my podcast (Game of Zen), unless we de-script from our inherited & reactive commitments and re-write our inspired commitments for Self, Work and Others, we are unlikely to find fulfillment in life.

Left unexamined, we typically proceed along career paths that look right “on paper,” or that we have inherited from our families, but leave important parts of ourselves unacknowledged. This is the definition of being “out of integrity.” At its worse, this results in self-betrayal that leaves us feeling depressed, and poisons our life and relationships.

So, the first opportunity in your professional inflection point is the chance to reflect on your self and discern what is important to you. This is the internal opportunity.

The second opportunity, the external one, is to develop your Work in a new and creative way, outside of the traditional “job-shaped containers” our economic system has offered. The metacrisis — which includes climate disruption, technological disruption (e.g. AI) and macroeconomic stressors — is radically re-structuring all those “job-shaped containers” anyway, so we are forced to adapt! This is a chance to exercise creativity, exploration and discovery in the service of personal growth and fulfillment.

It is important to recognize that there is some danger in this situation. Every crisis is after all technically an inflection point. That means that our decisions have outsized consequences. It’s where a new path is established in which things can get much better OR much worse. (In terms of complex systems, the “emergent properties” may be really good, or they might, like, really suck.)

So, in these times we have to act wisely, and not from conditioned or reactive patterns. This is where Zen practices and principles can help.

Having helped scores of people through transition, I can tell you some signs that you are responding to your inflection point from a place of conditioning and reactivity:

• Comparing yourself to others.

• Obsessive job-seeking.

• Negative self-talk (“I could never do that….”; “I’m too old/inexperienced …..”)

• Catastrophizing (“I’ll be on the streets.”)

• Compromising (“I would settle for that [uninspiring job].”)

• Feeling overwhelmed.

• Generalized anxiety.

It is very human to feel and think these things, but without a sound practice of self-reflection and wise exploration of your potentials, these tendencies will reinforce each other in a downward spiral that will result in, at best, another uninspiring professional engagement, and, at worse, an extended time in the hell realms of fear and instability.

Helping people navigate their terrain of inflection, employing the tried-and-true practices of Zen, is what I am most inspired to do. I have been doing it consciously in my personal life for the last ten years, and for the last four have been helping individuals with personal guidance.

As I finished writing this newsletter, I decided to offer a flash three-week summer mini-course in Zen@Work especially for people who have been recently laid off or are in the early stages of professional transition.

Click this big blue button for more details, including a short video I just recorded.

I’ll be writing more in the coming weeks on what makes for Good Work and how to find it.

In the meantime, may your life be joyful and your work in purpose.

• Paul

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay