Staying Human In A World Engineered to Rob You of Connection, Dignity, and Security
The engineered overwhelm and hardship in your life benefits others -- and wellne$$ content won't save you. Staying human is how you build and protect what matters.
Federal attacks on immigration infrastructure leaving us uncertain whether we can keep living in this country. A 14-month payment plan to cover an $8,000 ER bill — because Trump’s tax cuts for billionaires required gutting support for health insurance. Worry about my son and his generation trying to find work and afford a family in an economy being restructured by AI and the continuing stagnation of worker wages while CEO salaries balloon. News platforms engineered to keep me anxious and scanning for the next threat.
This is what hardship in 2026 feels like for me.
None of these things are my fault. And people on the other end of each situation are profiting financially or politically from my hardship.
Maybe it lands differently for you. Maybe it’s the disability services that just got cut and the person you care for who depends on them. The trans kid you’re trying to protect inside a school system that’s been told not to see them. The congregation fracturing over politics while the pastor says nothing. The neighborhood that ICE has made quiet in the wrong way. The books disappearing from the library at your kids’ school.
The forms are different. This is not actor-less, ambient “stress” or “burnout.” Your overwhelm benefits those who engineer these conditions. Naming that accurately is where effective resistance and coping begin. As long as you think it’s your fault, they keep winning.
For over a year, I’ve ended every post with “Remember: Stay human. Stay strategic. Shape tomorrow.” If you’re newer here, you’ve seen those words without knowing what’s behind them. Let’s explore this together.
What Staying Human Means To Me
Staying human is our defiant refusal to be ground down by systems based on cruelty, domination, and extraction — and the commitment to build and protect our shared spaces where dignity, solidarity, and care can take root.
It begins with accurate attribution. The hardship, fear, financial precarity, overwhelm, depletion, and shame you’re carrying — these are not personal failures. They are engineered by people who gain from your loss. The financial, cultural, and political systems built by people who profit from your pain also attack the civic values that make collective life worth living — care, dignity, truth, connection, meaning, compassion.
The same systems that harm you for profit also hand you a story that makes you responsible for the hardships in your life. The wellne$$ industrial complex is one of the worst offenders — peddling person-level prescriptions for your problems without ever naming the macro systems creating your hardships in the first place.
Seeing through their story is itself an act of resistance. With this understanding, self-mercy becomes essential: refusing to do the work of oppressive systems inside your own head, and restoring the capacity to keep building and protecting what matters.
These harmful forces of cruelty and domination don’t only press from outside. They seep inward — into our reactivity, our self-sabotage, the ways we harm others even while trying to build something better. Staying human requires honesty about what we do to each other — and refusing the comfortable lie that cruelty and harm belong exclusively to people “on the other side.”
Staying human is personal practice, political stance, and collective project — all at once. It means naming the actors and systems causing harm rather than treating suffering as weather with no source. It means choosing connection over imposed isolation. It means maintaining the capacity to act from values rather than fear. Staying human is strategic both personally and politically — a refusal to let extractive systems sever us from each other or from the civic values worth defending together.
There is no finish line. Neither the forces of harm nor the human capacity to resist and build are going away. This is the ongoing work — protecting what matters, inside unfair conditions.
The Ancient Tug of War
This tug of war didn’t start with Trump. Two things have always been true about human life, and neither is going away.
There has always been a manmade ocean of cruelty, domination, and extraction — built and maintained by people who profit from its persistence. Patriarchy, racism, capitalism, authoritarianism. The forms shift. The ocean persists.
And there has always been an equally ancient human capacity for love, solidarity, creativity, and care. Communities, families, schools, gardens, playgrounds, common spaces and shared resources.
Both things are permanent.
Inside that condition, people build dikes and flood plains to hold back the ocean of cruelty. Protected spaces where dignity and interdependence can take root. The dikes holding back the ocean need constant maintenance because the manmade ocean is always pressing and trying to seep in. Right now, the people who benefit most from the ocean of cruelty are going after the dikes directly — defunding and attacking them.
But the people controlling the ocean also help it seep through the ground and surface inside the flood plain itself, presenting as a solution while smuggling in harm. Think social media, AI, trickle down policies, investor returns — and the people getting rich from all of it.
I grew up on the receiving end of cruelty and abuse. I was also rescued, four times, by public safety net and mutual aid systems that worked well enough to save my life and let me keep building. Those experiences filled me with a determination to keep others from feeling abandoned by systems that should be protecting them. And I learned something Reagan got wrong: government, while not perfect, is not the source of most of our problems. It’s the necessary field leveler — the dike that protects people from forces too large to fight alone.
Staying human is dike and floodplain work. It’s what you do to keep the manmade ocean of cruelty from flooding what we’ve built. Not once. Not in a decisive final battle. You cannot vanquish the ocean. You work every day, in the specific conditions of your specific life and community. You remember that the most important strategy in a tug of war is to never let go of the rope and to pull together.
Living The Questions
So I’ll end the way I end every conversation on my podcast — with the questions I most want us to sit with:
What does staying human mean for you, right now, in your experience of 2026?
How are you protecting the dikes and building connection, security, meaning, and joy in the floodplain despite the pressure of the ocean?
The biggest lesson in my lifetime is learning how incredibly creative and resourceful people are at answering these questions. There’s no single right answer. Share yours in the comments if you’re a paid subscriber — or restack this post and share when you restack.
In solidarity,
Paul
Remember: Stay human. Stay strategic. Shape tomorrow.
Note to free subscribers
Starting last month, some of each month’s posts will now include a paywall. I’ve dropped the annual subscription price from $80 to $30 per year. That’s the lowest the platform allows. Less than $3 a month. I don’t want price to stand between this work and anyone who needs it — and I am trying to earn a living. Paid subscribers make it possible for me to keep writing, building tools, offering free group sessions, and reaching people who need this work. Please upgrade to paid and ensure you have access to all future content. Thank you.
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About Me
I help people stay steady in the face of authoritarian assault and extractive systems so they can keep showing up without losing their effectiveness or humanity. I draw on decades of community organizing, deep expertise in research and collaborative community problem-solving, contemplative practice and mindfulness teaching, and what I’ve learned from tens of thousands of subscribers in 95 countries.
I was fired three weeks before Christmas, 2024 for refusing to delete a LinkedIn post about Trump’s campaign promises to target federal workers. I launched this blog soon thereafter. It’s my way of pitching in, standing in solidarity with you all, doing my part to help build a progressive future rooted in things worth fighting for: justice, equity, security, and care.
I also do coaching and consulting with activist groups, nonprofits, and universities doing good work in hard circumstances. Contact me to learn more about my services.
