As you can likely attest, life is sufficiently challenging when you know your life has meaning and you know your 2-word purpose. Image just how hopeless difficult it would be clinging to the belief life is meaningless and you have no reason for being.
In my mail Saturday was the venerable Pew Trusts’ magazine Trend with a dedicated theme of “The Age of Anxiety.” Leafing through the articles by a number of PhDs and other experts, I marveled at the masterful messaging and supporting graphics.
Unfortunately, a sense of conviction and failure washed over me, not with anxiety but with inspiration and rededication. Since the late 1980s, my life’s work has been about awakening and guiding people to find meaning and purpose in their life and work. In the 1998 release of The On-Purpose Business Person, I predicted that the age beyond “The Digital Age” would be “The Age of Purpose and Meaning.” And it still can be; however, when an esteemed organization such as Pew Trusts declares we’re living in “The Age of Anxiety,” I reflexively recoil at the incompleteness (recklessness?) of thought.
I’m feeling a bit like Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: the harder I’ve labored, the further behind our society has fallen. Not that I feel responsible for the well-being of mankind, but having pioneered, advanced, and educated regarding a critical component (purpose and being on-purpose) of holistic health that makes a huge dent in equipping people to deal with adversity and anxiety, it bewilders me. My belief and operating system, however, are based on the sacredness of life — an increasingly discounted notion as being outdated and irrelevant to our modern times of the epidemic of dis-ease.
“We don’t have a mental health crisis. Anxiety is the symptomatic byproduct of a meaningless life. We have a spiritual crisis.”
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: “We don’t have a mental health crisis. Anxiety is the symptomatic byproduct of a meaningless life. We have a spiritual crisis.” A spiritual battle for hearts, minds, and souls isn’t waged or won with a closed-loop mindset and method that rejects spirituality. The slide from fret into full-on anxiety (apart from a clinical diagnosis) is rooted in an incomplete set of personal leadership skills and attitudes built on godless post-modernism.
Logic dictates that if the world is meaningless, why bother becoming a better person? Why try? When all hope is lost, the soul of fertile ground for the weed of anxiety to consume the spirit. Nothing matters, except anxiety running amok as the “intellectuals” wonder why they’re anxious. Contentment alludes because choosing (yes choosing) a “life is meaningless” worldview can only end badly.
The proof is in the statistics and charts in this current Trend magazine — something in our society isn’t working. As the religion of meaninglessness and its doctrine of indifference proliferates and produces angst. The fruit of the preaching of these prophets of the profane cultivates lives of insignificant, climate change doomsday, and a world without cause and effect. The speed and increase of this generalized worldwide “rationale” of irrationality must result in mental instability compounded by one’s fraying personal living circumstance. Such perspective invariably produces anxiety if not downright derangement.
We carry an innate need for something that is unconditional, unchanging, stable, and dependable to anchor our life. Secularists are empty-handed in their intellectual conundrum and denial of God. They’re carrying and carving at anxiety with an intellectual knife while engaged in a spiritual gunfight. With their limited arsenal they may manage and mitigate but will never overcome.
We can, however, turn our issues over to a higher power for help and guidance. To the “post-modern mind,” this suggestion sounds nostalgic, antiquated, and trite. Except for the fact that it works and has healed people for millennia.
Sadly, for all the sophisticated writers and beautiful presentation, Trend dared not or didn’t have the insight or guts to address meaning and spirituality as it relates to anxiety. There’s the crux of the matter. Focusing on mental health to the exclusion of spiritual flourishing is a costly diversion that a dose of healthy Truth can cure.
Be On-Purpose!
Kevin
