Here’s how we’re saving the world

The escalator will take you now.

A few months ago, I had a conversation with my partner that changed everything.

We’d just arrived at the mall for a Sunday morning film, and as we got on the escalator for the sixth-floor cinema, our conversation shifted from leisurely taxi chatter to a sober discussion of a fundamental belief I had.

A belief I began by carefully stating, confident my partner would concur once he understood what I meant. When he didn’t immediately agree, I launched into one example after another to argue my case.

First floor, second floor, we rose. Me expounding, him silent. Listening, not agreeing. I began to panic—did it take us seven years to discover a fundamental incompatibility?

But then: What if I’m wrong?

I ceased my word-salad and asked my partner for his take. He started talking. I started listening. By the fourth floor, I was seeing cracks in a belief I would have died defending one floor down. By the sixth, he had so thoroughly undone my belief I felt silly I ever thought it true.

The Belief I Would Have Died Defending

Boundaries.

For as long as I’ve been self-aware, I’ve fiercely believed in boundaries. Talk with me long enough, you’ll hear derivations of: You must take responsibility for your own life, and not for any one else’s, nor let anyone take responsibility for yours.

Every issue—relationship, work, family, or otherwise—I chalked up to a lack of boundaries. Spat with the partner? Boundaries. Overworked? Boundaries. Toxic family? Boundaries.

I believed, with every firing neuron that constituted my consciousness, boundaries were the solution to everyone’s problems. That if only people were better at drawing and enforcing boundaries, they would not be so miserable.

After all, boundaries saved me. When I supported my partner through his grief without taking it on. When I uninstalled Slack and evaded a burnout. When I told my dying father, stunning him into silence, that I would only visit him twice a year, not the four times he wanted.

I was so confident my partner, a seasoned therapist, would agree—everyone should have boundaries—that I was in turn silenced when he said he did not.

We as a species have flourished without boundaries for far longer than we have with. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans relied on one another to survive. The concept of boundaries you’re advocating—I’m responsible for me, you for you—only emerged in the last hundred years.

As we rode the escalator, my partner gently hammering at one of my fundamental beliefs with his decades of wisdom, I experienced something I hope you experience at least once in your life.

My entire worldview shifted.

Up until that point, somewhere between the third and fourth floors, I’d believed there was a right, and wrong, way to live. That the right way was to live a life of boundaries, of personal responsibility, of choice. That it was wrong, suboptimal, counterproductive to have no boundaries, to outsource your life to someone else—a partner, a parent, a child—to not make choices and gladly suffer the consequences.

In a single escalator ride, my partner helped me see there was a right way for me, there was a right way for him—there was no right way for everyone.

There is no such thing as a universal “right way” to live, and our not seeing this is destroying the world.

The Non-Belief That Will Save the World

Every conflict that ever was, that ever will be, boils down to the belief that there is a “right” way, a superior way, a way that should be not so much imposed as enlightened on everybody else.

But there isn’t.

Every single person on this earth was born with a set of genes, caregivers, and circumstances that shaped their worldview, taught them what “right” looked like. Then we grow up, and because we don’t bother to investigate others’ internal worlds, we become ever more isolated, entrenched, convinced our “right” is the only way.

We come to believe we know better. If only others would see the error of their ways.

What if, what if none of us believe this?

What if we recognise that there is a right way for me, and there is a right way for you, and the two need not be identical?

What if, instead of arguing, fighting, killing to decide, once and for all, which “right” is right, we accept there is no such thing? What if, instead of marshalling every argument imaginable to prove the superiority of our worldview, we consider the very likely possibility that all those “inferior” worldviews have been working just fine for millions whose lives had been shaped in different ways than ours, and will continue to do so if only we let them be?

What if, the next time you meet someone on the opposite end of whatever spectrum you find yourself on, you don’t dismiss them as evil, ignorant, or stupid—and instead ask them to take you on a journey to the source of their beliefs, through the experiences that taught them, the struggles they overcame, the joys they celebrated?

What kind of a world would that be?

What do you think?

What a world we’d share, if we all got better at recognising the errors of our ways.

What is one belief you’d die defending? What would it look like if you were wrong?

Please hit “reply” or leave a comment—I read every response and I’d love to hear from you. If you want, share this post with someone whose thoughts on this you’d like to hear.

Until next Friday… Stay thoughtful,

Val