If you're doing it in the moment, you've already won

I pull up on my bike to shed a layer as I begin to feel the warmth. August in Perth can be like that. Blessed sunshine between winter storms. But there’s another reason for pulling up. has just landed the punchline bringing home his latest short-form monologue for the Team Human podcast, titled I Gave Up On Saving The World.

The blurb read:

Are we so focused on saving the world that we’re forgetting how to care for it? Rushkoff explores the paralyzing ambient terror of the meta-crisis, polycrisis, and impending societal collapse. Recounting a transformative personal experience sitting at the bedside of a dying relative, Rushkoff re-evaluates the urge to fix everything through abstract strategies and grand interventions. Instead of treating the future as an engineering problem to solve, what happens if we shift from being agents of change to agents of care? What if our most radical act of resistance isn’t another techno-fix or activist bypass, but serving as death doulas for a failing industrial system, and birth doulas for the human-centered world waiting to take its place?

Everything changed for Douglas after that mysterious bedside vigil. Which is telling, as he candidly admitted resenting having to be there. Did his dying relative even know he was there? He could be doing something worthwhile for the world, with his profile and experience, shifting the dial on something important.

Instead, he was unexpectedly set on a different course.

The real human work of accepting our mortality and sitting with grief is not a self-indulgent detour from the political struggle. It’s the ultimate guardrail. It’s what prevents our necessary rebellions from degenerating into the same ends justify the means control structures that are destined to annihilate us.

That closing punchline? Rushkoff recalled that he’d finished his book Survival of the Richest with:

If you’re not doing it in the moment, you’re not doing it at all.

‘And let me add to that’, he said.

If you are doing it in the moment, you’ve already won.

The echoes ring out.

***

Our young boy has recently started training at an Aikido martial arts academy. It was just last night that I got to reading the lengthy training manual, which includes the story of its founding and lineage. One line really landed with me, so I took a screenshot of it.

I’m out here cycling the coast that constituted the best of my struggling childhood, having just got off the line from recording next week’s episode for The RegenNarration podcast.

My guest was Les Szabo. He’s the quietly spoken Chief Strategy and Impact Officer at Dr. Bronner's, the top-selling brand of natural soaps, body care and food products with the All-One ethos. When I spoke with David Bronner, its Cosmic Engagement Officer (CEO) at Bronner’s HQ a couple of years ago, he came with breaking news of a new initative. Les was its architect.

Dr. Bronner’s Has a Plan to Change Capitalism as We Know It. That’s the headline that Inc. Magazine ran on the recent launch of the Purpose Pledge. Describing it as ‘a new gold standard of social entrepreneurship,’ the article led off with this: ‘The B Corp and the billionaires’ Giving Pledge are broken—so says the team at Dr. Bronner’s.’ Well, it might be a bit more nuanced than that, but Bronner’s has discontinued its B-Corp certification.

As Les shared his story with me, it became clear how he too had been unexpectedly changed by both his experience dodging death, and that of a close friend who sadly didn’t.

Tracing back to that very unpleasant time … I was depressed and … did try therapy and it didn't work. And then I had an opportunity to sit in an ayahuasca ceremony. [That had a] life-changing effect and it put me on this path, on the medicine path. And I would say that not only personally and emotionally, just changing my life, but also I think in terms of the work I'm doing. I'm doing it based on these medicine experiences.

He went on to say:

When you have that, that brush with death, then everything kind of shifts in terms of how you view your relationships and your life and your work. And the download was so simple but so profound. And the idea was that everything that I do has to be with asking that question of, am I laying the groundwork for what's next? And not just in terms of family and kids, but am I doing work that is in service of my family and my community and the earth?

As our conversation drew to a close, Les had been describing his hopes for how the Purpose Pledge might help other people in companies take some of this to heart, and into the heart of their operations, when he caught himself on a word so ubiquitous to almost be a given in how we refer to each other:

We're trying to move away from using the term stakeholder - for a variety of reasons. I've heard careholder, I've heard rights holder, and there's just relations, you know. One of my spiritual leaders, his name is Sandor Iron Rope, he's a Lakota elder, and we work together closely on peyote conservation. He introduced me to this term, all my relations. And that kind of says it all, all my relations. And when you have that worldview and cosmology, that everything is about relationships and right relationship, then stakeholder just feels completely inadequate.

As Les was saying this, I was thinking about my screenshot last night. I opened it up to share it with him. But really, he’d already said it.

The medicine path. Akin to what I’ve perceived coming through nearly 10 years of the podcast now, from people of all walks. The more we step inside ‘the harmony of nature’, our nature, the more wind is at our backs. The less we defeat ourselves, even. The more we’ve already won.

Thanks for reading this reader and listener-supported column. My conversation with Les Szabo will be out at dawn, Wednesday morning Australian time, wherever podcasts are found. And if you’re interested in the episode Douglas Rushkoff and I recorded ‘live in New York’, for our respective podcasts, head to episode 229, Moving From Figure to Ground.