The route to triple wellbeing
Right now, we are living in the most connected time in human history. We can fly to distant lands across the other side of the world, video call people any time of day or night, shop for whatever our hearts and wallets desire at the touch of a button and orchestrate pretty much anything we want from small devices that sit in the palm of our hands. Humans have evolved to extraordinary levels of interconnectivity as we have globalised - and yet, in this moment of ultra-connectivity, we find ourselves suffering from chronic disconnection.
Over the course of human history, Western society has slowly fragmented the world into bits and pieces and slowly separated ourselves into the process. Through our rapid growth as ‘modern humans’ we have gradually disconnected and divided ourselves from the three core areas that humans need to flourish: connections to ourselves, to each other and to the natural world. We are experiencing ever-increasing levels of depression and burnout, often coupled with a loss of meaning and loss of our deeper selves. We disconnected from being a part of collaborative and equal societies, with the ever-growing levels of poverty, inequality and social divides in our communities leaving us fractured and segregated. And through our relentless and unprecedented environmental destruction we are seeing the loss of ecosystems across the world and the onset of a climate crisis.
This story of separation has spread like a myth through our societies and communities, allowing us to move ever further from our natural connected states of being towards spaces of independence, isolation and disconnection – spaces that literally go against the fabric of the systems that we are living within and are part of. In essence, we have created a way of living that is fundamentally unhealthy for ourselves, for our societies and for the planet as a whole with the systemic loss of nature, loss of community and the loss of the Self.
Whether or not we accept these broken systems, we can all of us recognise the feelings deep within us, sensing an increasing feeling of disconnection and separation in our lives as we evolve, and oftentimes finding ourselves adrift.
So what do these disconnections look like?
DISCONNECTED FROM OURSELVES:
We have been brought up to believe that personal growth is defined dominantly in terms of material wealth, making us put aside emotional and social well-being in favour of a need for ‘more, more more’. In our rush to develop and progress, we have focused more on power than purpose, on reputation than character and whilst we might be sharing inspiring stories, tweets or posts about what or how we are, we are drifting further away from a space of knowing who and why we are. We have been actively encouraged to pursue independence, often ignoring the glaring fact that there is no such concept in the interdependent world in which we live – we’ve simply built a fib by choosing to ignore all of the people that we actively depend on for pretty much everything. And as we’ve grown, we have concentrated so much on the doing that we have forgotten all about the being.
DISCONNECTED FROM OTHERS:
Our colonial past has segregated and separated us through economic models of dominance, with globalisation promoting a system of monoculture over diversity. Beyond this many structures in our communities (for example our jobs, schools, political systems) encourage us to be individualistic, competitive and mistrustful of people. Whilst the over-reliance on technology reduces basic human contact, we have also separated ourselves from others by literally living, working and travelling in ‘boxes’ to keep ourselves apart, with success being measured through the luxuriousness of the boxes we acquire (e.g. a big fancy office, a luxurious new car, a large detached house). The boxes in which ‘success’ dwells are, ironically, all places where we separate ourselves from others and the natural world.
DISCONNECTED FROM THE NATURAL WORLD
In most Western societies, we spend far fewer moments outdoors and in contact with soil and trees than indigenous communities and dramatically less time compared to our pre-industrial lives, during which we were entirely integrated with nature. A recent survey by the National Trust showed how the average UK citizen spends around two minutes in nature per day. Two minutes. Our dominant belief systems have placed us above the natural world, seeing it predominantly as a resource from which we can extract. By doing so, we have started seeing ourselves as the ‘evolutionary gods’, no longer a part of nature, but an owner, a controller, a consumer. In doing so we have separated ourselves from our natural ecosystems, and cut ourselves from a fundamental connection to our emotional health and wellbeing.
How has this happened?
Whilst none of these have been an intentional plan or direct result of our actions, there are three main triggers in human history which have served as the catalysts for our current state of disconnection: the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the Technological Revolution. Each of these has played a crucial role in building our sense of separation and division and moved us further away from our natural states of being on the planet and have emerged from habits and beliefs our cultures follow for generations and have embedded themselves as ‘norms’ in our lives.
The story of separation is one told time and again across our popular culture and threaded through all levels of our social constructs. We can see it in our stories, in our music, in our films, in our politics and in our measures of success (GDP). It is spread throughout our social norms but most significantly the foundations for separation are dug deep at school, with our mainstream education fragmented and decompartmentalised, teaching separation and perpetuating disconnection:
Learning is divided into separate subjects and rarely teaches children how they link together as a whole
Academic grades are considered the most important element of school career, with children’s wellbeing a secondary consideration at best
The competitive and individualistic grade structures are designed so that only a small number of children will ever succeed whilst many are simply expected to fail
Children are shut inside for most of the day for most of their childhood, usually seated and separated from each other
We decompartmentalise our learning into subjects, boxes, separate parts and invite students to compete to achieve success. Students graduate without knowing how to think in systems or find connections and patterns, how to ask big questions or think broadly and deeply.
We have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education and it’s impoverishing our spirits and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.
KEN ROBINSON | Learning Revolution
Demands of education policies mean that schools now are having to focus more on measurable, tangible results than on nurturing emotional wellbeing and school has become more about competition, separation and stress than it has about nurturing happy, healthy, thriving young people. On a very basic level, right from the get-go, our schools are separating us from our innate ways of being and knowing and teaching us out of what is natural behaviour.
We are whole beings who think, feel and connect with all of our body and all of our senses, and yet our schools are ignoring our wholeness and ignoring our innate ways of being in favour of a factory-line regulation and conformity model.
We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years and come out at least with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing. We cannot use our hands or our legs or our eyes or our arms. We do not know an edible root in the woods. We cannot tell our course by the stars nor the hour of the day by the sun.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON | Walden
The post-Industrial Western world has spread these disconnected models of education far out into the wider world through historical channels of colonialism and technological globalisation, removing people from regenerative, diverse and cultural freedoms of learning into following compartmentalised patterns of education and social behaviours that hurt most of us who are part of them.
So what does it mean to be well?
Many people are starting to wake up to just how unhealthy our ways of life has become whilst also making connections to how our health and wellbeing is intrinsically linked to that of the planet.
Being well starts with deepening and strengthening our relationships with ourselves, with society and with the natural world. Wellbeing is not a quick-fix act, solved with the quick downing of a probiotic yoghurt and a 20-minute yoga session. It is a lifelong practice and something we can learn to embed holistically into our lives.
Triple wellbeing is focused on nurturing and fostering healthy relationships with these three areas that we have separated from - ourselves, with society and with the natural world.
These three areas of wellbeing are not simply ‘nice ideas’ but fundamental to the health and wellbeing of people and planet and the route to whole-person, whole system flourishing.
Our programmes at ThoughtBox have been designed to support these three healthy relationships by offering schools the tools, practices and resources to foster wellness across the community– embedding the practices of critical thinking, empathy and systems thinking into learning and allowing young people to learn to care for and connect with themselves, others and the natural world and to journey along the route towards triple wellbeing.
Find out more about our Think & Thrive triple-wellbeing programmes here.
ThoughtBox is network of teachers and changemakers helping one million young people become active: Socially, Emotionally and Environmentally through our triple wellbeing programmes. We offer a range of trainings and triple wellbeing curriculum to schools to develop a culture of wellbeing for people and planet. Let’s talk.