The Reason You’re Not Thriving Right Now

#TransparentTuesdays

Hi friend,

Recently I wrote about the epidemic of “nameless pain and suffering” that I’ve been noticing lately—in which so many people report that while there is nothing wrong, exactly, they are struggling to thrive—and promised to get back to you if I figured anything out.

I asked for feedback, and many of you responded to share personal stories, insights, and concerns (all of which seemed to hover around the same themes), and I brought it up with my own brilliant therapist, in the hopes of solidifying my thoughts.

While I still have more questions than answers, I’m very excited to come back and share what I’ve discovered so far. 

In order to talk about what I think is going on, I need to first introduce a term you may (or may not) have heard before: “moral distress.”

Moral distress is the negative feeling that comes from knowing the morally correct or right thing to do, but being unable to take that action due to constraints, conflicts, or powerlessness.

Moral distress is often observed among healthcare providers— for example, when overworked and undersupported nurses see people suffer unnecessarily, simply because bureaucratic red tape blocks them from providing optimal care. Over time, these kinds of morally distressing experiences add up, and become a common cause for stress, burnout, and (ultimately) career changes among health care workers.

It’s easy to understand moral distress in a high stakes situation like that, where someone’s ability to do the right thing is actively hampered by the system, and the consequences are immediate and dire.

I believe a constant lower-stakes version of moral distress is the thing we are all struggling with right now, and the reason so many of us are unable to fully thrive.

Late stage capitalism has made it so that dozens of times per day, we’re forced to choose between what we know is morally right, and the realistic management of our own needs.

We shop at stores owned by billionaires, because they allow us to stay within our budget. We buy products that aren’t as clean or ethical as we would prefer, because they work better. We pay for subscriptions to massive corporations, because they make the content we enjoy, or allow us to stay connected to the world.

With the ever-increasing merging of corporations and power-hoarding of monopolies, there are so few truly ethical options available to us nowadays. Most of our decisions aren't between “good” and "evil," but rather between “slightly better in one way,” and “slightly worse in another.” 

This means that in order to feel like decent people, we must give each decision a certain amount of mental and emotional labor: comparing and contrasting, weighing the relative evil of each choice against our own needs and limitations, and deciding what we can and can’t live with. 

This might sound like:

• “I know I shouldn’t order from ___, but given my budget and time/energy limitations, they make it possible for me to stay afloat.”

• “Sure this company is anti-trans, but at least they’re cruelty and toxin free, and they do plant a tree for every purchase, so…”

• “Yes this company is owned by a billionaire, but that billionaire also owns the majority of the competition, so in order to avoid giving them my money I would simply have to give up this product or service, which doesn’t feel doable.”

• “This platform supports the oppression of marginalized people, but it’s the only way I can reach people to run my business… which is all about liberation.”

Every single one of these decisions costs us something, both in the time/energy we spend weighing and debating the choice, and in the moral burden we then carry for not having been able to make a choice that feels truly right and good to us, deep down.

We may not often think about it consciously, but on some level I believe most of us are aware that the only way to truly do the right thing (morally speaking) would be to eschew all modern conveniences, disconnect from the world, and build a self-sufficient life completely off the grid, where we make our own clothes, grow our own food, and divorce ourselves from technology.

That isn’t a realistic possibility for most of us, of course. But that awareness, however deep it may be buried in our subconscious, stays with us in some way, and causes us a feeling of deep moral unease.

On top of that, the rise of the internet means we are connected 24/7 to news and media, which means we carry with us a much more intense, constant, and overwhelming awareness of all the pain, suffering, violence, corruption, toxicity, and oppression happening in the world than we ever did before. 

With that awareness comes the burden of knowing the world is full of corrupt and immoral people, and the pressure of feeling like there is always more we could (or should) be doing to help. 

We see the devastating impact our current administration is having on human rights, personal freedoms, and the climate, and we know we should be doing more to fight back… but we don’t know how, don’t believe our small contributions make a difference, or don’t feel like we have the spare money/energy/time with which to do so. 

It’s not like we’re not trying to do the right thing.

We vote, we donate to important political campaigns, and we try to get the word out by talking to people about the issues we hold most dear. Whenever we can, we boycott the worst of the corporations, support small businesses and artists by buying local, avoid products that aren’t cruelty-free, or thrift instead of buying new. We might even call or email our local representatives about important topics, donate to mutual aid, or go to protests. 

But alongside all of these morally-clear decisions, we also do things that feel morally-yucky if we think about them too much, because we… just kind of have to.

We work for companies whose values don’t align with ours because we need the paycheck, and patronize companies who support causes we’re opposed to because they keep our lives running. We pay taxes, contribute to our retirement funds, buy houses, and participate in the stock market because we need to protect our financial futures. We do things we know are bad for our health or the environment because it would require a massive lifestyle change to stop.

We go about our daily business instead of dedicating our lives to fighting for justice, peace, and the protection of our fellow humankind, because…well, what’s the alternative?

In other words, while we go about our lives focused on whatever is in front of us, we’re constantly adding to our ever-increasing moral burden— the deep sense of knowing that something is wrong or bad, while not being able to set it right. 

Every single decision we make that doesn’t align with our values and moral compass has an impact. A small one, maybe, but those impacts add up, and the end result (the death of a thousand papercuts) is that we are all living our lives in a state of chronic moral distress. 

Although, actually, that’s not quite the right term. 

In the healthcare world, the term “moral distress,” and the more severe version of it: a “moral injury,” are used to describe the acutely negative feeling or trauma a person experiences when they make a mistake that causes harm, find themselves unable to do the right thing, or witness something that profoundly violates their core values. 

These two terms are differentiated severity and psychological impact, so an example of moral distress might be a nurse who is working in conditions of understaffing, who has to choose which patient needs their attention first, and later realizes that a patient they didn’t attend to first suffered more pain or discomfort than they needed to, while waiting. 

A moral injury, on the other hand, is more severe, and akin to PTSD. An example might be if a nurse attends to a child who has been badly abused, neglected, or beaten, and has to watch as the child suffers and dies, because the very people who should have been protecting her thought the child was “faking,” or didn’t want to be inconvenienced by a hospital visit.

I think it’s important to understand the definitions for these terms, because they refer to acute experiences of various levels of severity, and I don’t want to water down the meaning of these words by suggesting that these acute and traumatic experiences are on the same level as what we experience when we order from Amazon, or decide not to donate money to a cause we believe in. 

Instead, I’m introducing you to these terms because they give us the concrete language that we so desperately need right now, to help us frame and conceptualize the nameless burden we’ve all been carrying. 

A more accurate term for what I’m describing here—the epidemic of people feeling like they simply cannot realistically live up to their own values (or moral code) under late-stage capitalism—would actually be “moral residue.”

Moral residue is defined as the lingering guilt, regret, or distress that a person might feel after experiencing a morally challenging situation where they didn’t feel like they did (or could do) the "right" thing, where they felt like they compromised their values or integrity in some way, or they had to bear witness to a moral injustice that they did not have the power to set right. 

Moral residue describes the lasting emotional and psychological impact from unresolved moral distress, and it often shows up when a person feels like their moral concerns are going unacknowledged, because that means they’ll continue to be unable to take the “right action,” and the situation won’t be addressed or set right.

In other words, chronic moral residue both develops as a result of, and helps create a feeling of powerlessness; helplessness; hopelessness; despair. 

And it’s important to note that moral residue accumulates over time, with repeated exposure to moral dilemmas, violations, or compromises, and without the ability to adequately and appropriately resolve each transgression.

My theory, currently, is that living with this constant and ever-increasing burden of moral residue is the source of the “epidemic of unnamed pain” I’ve been trying to put words to.

In a world where it feels like we simply cannot live in a way that aligns with our values or moral compass—because the interplay between government and corporate greed makes that impossible—we’re all carrying an increasingly heavy moral burden. 

We’re constantly put in positions where we need to compromise our own values or integrity in one way or another just to get by. And unless we disconnect from the world completely, we have no choice but to bear witness to both big and small violations of our values and moral code, that we cannot meaningfully improve, on a daily basis.

And because we know the powers that be (ie: billionaires and the politicians who rely on their money) want it to be like this, we also know that this situation is unlikely to change anytime soon. 

If anything, it feels like the endless stream of moral violations and compromises are likely to keep getting worse, not better… which means that on top of everything else, we’re also carrying the burden of feeling helpless, and losing hope. 

As you can probably imagine, this situation is bad for our mental, emotional, spiritual, and even physical health. Is it any wonder that so many people right now are reporting that even though everything is fine, they feel flat, exhausted, anxious, depressed, stuck, or demoralized?

This topic is hard to talk about, both because it’s playing out below our day-to-day levels of consciousness, and because it’s extremely uncomfortable to look more closely at the deep residual ickyness of moral residue. 

In fact, it often feels like our very ability to stay functional (and keep going) depends on our ability to ignore the reality of moral residue… or at least, to keep it at a distance.

But just because our moral residue isn’t completely sinking us doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be dealt with. Because it’s also preventing us from really thriving, and that matters. 

I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this. Do you resonate with the burden of moral distress, or moral residue, that comes from late-stage capitalism and the digital era?

If so, please hit reply and share your thoughts! 

I’ll be writing more about this over the next month or so, because I think it’s such a massive, complex, and important topic, and I’d love to hear from you. 

Big hug,

Jessi