Losing our souls – Julian Summerhayes

Schools don’t value individualism, less still curiosity.

They value compliance!

It annihilates the soul.

Just imagine it: a world where education meant more than a bushel of meaningless exams.

The focus then would have to be on the person…

Skip a few decades and look at your work/life balance. 

Where’s your soul?

In your work? That’s not my experience. 

Of course, that’s not to say that a few companies aren’t trying to re-engineer the workplace, but the industrial complex is not set to reconnect with true self. Much like school, it wants compliant cogs — see Linchpin by Seth Godin.

Right now, we need teachers, leaders and elders (if they still exist) to make the case for the reemergence of our souls. To wake us from our narcissistic torpor. That means to challenge the thesis that globalisation is a good thing. Do that and we can then have a grown-up conversation about the cultural narrative apropos growth, consumerism and material wealth.

Does that mean absent all that’s gone wrong with the world — as if it could be fixed simply by starting a conversation — that we’d rediscover our souls? I don’t know, but it sure beats the marching orders we’ve assimilated which leaves us living such hopeless lives.