Reply To: Exercise 9: Second Personal Essay
Exercise 9: Second Personal Essay
I remember asking my friend once, as the early Covid era restrictions were lifting, if they knew of any support groups for depression.
“Sure,” they laughed. “They’re called bars.”
And there it is. This sad cycle of suffering. And addiction. And isolation. But where to begin in interrupting the cycle? Which group of people am I looking at and what are they feeling? My instinctive answer is: everybody living in non-sustainable cultures feel conscious or unconscious guilt, shame, and despair at the state of the world and their roles within it. But most people aren’t ready to admit it, in my experience. So, does that “count” as a problem, by Initiative standards of definition?
In the course of this workshop, my problem-solution set took various shapes. Here is a short list of the problems I was purporting to solve and the shape my solutions took:
• Early-stage entrepreneurs feel too busy to attend additional trainings; provide sustainability leadership workshops, later updated to coaching services & emphasize triple bottom line
• People in jails and prisons feel abandoned by society; provide sustainability leadership workshops in jails, later updated to cooking workshops in prisons, later updated to monthly support groups with food
• People in residential facilities feel lacking in basic life skills, such as cooking; provide cooking workshops (with sustainability leadership scripts utilized) in halfway houses and juvenile facilities, later updated to included senior centers, universities, large employers, etc, basically sold as a health and wellness class
But what problem am I really trying to solve?
The concept I keep returning to is a support group, even though I know the concept we’re supposed to start with is the unwanted emotions of a defined group. Still, though, the support group thing feels so resonant. The more I dive into sustainability as a lifestyle—and into sustainability leadership as a livelihood—the more I see addiction to plastic and pollution as the opposite lifestyle, and the more I wonder if other addiction models might help us break through to the general population. And the recovery world leans heavily on support groups. But then again, how do you run support groups for people who are addicted to a thing that everybody else in the world (rounding up) is also addicted to? We all generally agree as a society that opioids and alcohol are addictive substances which can cause massive harm, but we do not all generally agree as a society that plastic and petroleum products are addictive substances which can cause massive harm.
Any help, feedback or general thoughts are very much welcome.