Where Did the Love Go?

An Epidemic of Lost People

Donnie Fitzpatrick is a basketball coach and career counselor at a high school north of Vancouver. He interviews each of his senior students for an hour, during which he asks them a dozen or so open-ended questions. These are not “Where do you want to go to college?” sorts of questions, but instead “Who are you? How do you make decisions? When was the last time a day flew by?” sorts of questions. He has done more than four thousand of these types of interviews with students in grades 8 through 12. They begin each morning at 7:30 and continue one after the other until the school day ends.

According to him, these are his top three findings:

Over the years, even if initially reluctant to be interviewed for an hour, all the students really enjoy the process. Students miss their appointments at school for all manner of things, even things they like, but hardly any miss their appointment with Donnie.

Almost all of them tear up as they answer the questions—something, he says, about having a space where their own truth can surface without being right or wrong releases a flood of emotion.

The ones with the best grades and the most impressive college applications, he tells me, seem to well up the most—these students have done everything the educational system has asked of them, and yet the stress of this has caused many of them to feel most disconnected from their authentic voice.

“Despite thousands of caring and well-meaning educators, something about the way we are doing it,” he says, “is causing our high schoolers to lose connection to discovering who they really are.”

My version of this losing didn’t happen in high school. At twenty-nine I started having panic attacks.

I was working for Gallup and had moved to Orlando to lead the company’s relationship with Walt Disney World. The first panic attack hit me when I was out for dinner with a gaggle of Disney execs. They were all lovely people, but as I sat there in a perfectly pleasant steak house in the Contemporary Resort, I started to feel my field of vision narrow. The periphery blurred. I became fixated on the beating of my heart. Pressure. On my chest, mostly, but also all around me. Pressure on time itself—the moments stopped flowing one to the next, and instead each moment stuttered to a halt, and became disconnected from the one following it. I couldn’t catch my breath. I was trapped under something heavy, but there was nothing to lift off of me. Just the grinning of my dinner companions. I felt a mad need to run, to shove the table violently away from me and run as fast as I could. Anywhere, I didn’t care where, just out of there, out of that airless place. I’d never had this feeling before.

These days everyone seems to know what panic attacks are. They’ve become part of common parlance because so many of our kids and students are getting them. With so much focus on grades, so much Adderall being prescribed and taken, so much Xanax being offered to counteract the Adderall, it’s little wonder we’re all becoming expert in the symptoms of anxiety and panic. How they affect the human body. How to treat them, damp them down. Panic attacks are like acne now. Just part of growing up.

But when I got my first one, I wasn’t an expert in panic. I just thought I was losing my mind.

I went to my doctor, who told me what had happened to me. “I’m not panicked!” I told him. “At least, I don’t feel panicked. I do my job. Do a ton of public speaking. And feel fine about it all.”

“Well, that’s as may be,” he said, “but these are definitely panic attacks. Stress hormones are flooding your body and creating these feelings of intense pressure. After a while, this starts to eat away at you. Your mind wears out. It can’t contain all the vigilance. The pressure spills out into all parts of your life, and you start to panic. It’s not this one present moment that’s panicking you. It’s the buildup of your life on edge.”

So I started meditating.

Which got me through the worst of it. Me and my mantra—the word “One,” said silently, each breath a relief, a release. “One” on a rock. “One” sitting up in bed. “One” with my headphones on as the plane pulls back from the jetway. “One” took the pressure off. I thank God for “One.”

And yet “One” was good only for keeping the panic at bay. It didn’t do anything to fill me up. It was a mechanism for coping, not flourishing. I was still lost to myself, still empty inside and clueless about how to fill myself with life. So empty that even when the most amazing things happened—building my company, writing books, having Oprah devote an entire show to me and my work—they didn’t register as joy. Looking at the picture of Oprah and me hugging post-show, my grinning expression is all surface, a happy mask, strapped on and held in place by the strings pulled taut around my neck. Who is that guy? I look at him now and he’s not me. His happiness is unconvincing. A happy hollow man.

Sharing this with you feels indulgent—like I’m complaining when I should just be grateful for the blessings in my life. And yet my experience was intense and real and, these days, commonplace.

Across all socioeconomic strata, all regions, all races, we see anxiety causing harm at unprecedented levels. To medicate ourselves and our children, we rely more and more on prescription drugs. High-profile young athletes, such as Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles, are stepping back to preserve their mental health. For the first time in a century, the average life expectancy in the US is falling, and has been for the last three years. Much of this decrease is being caused by so-called deaths of despair—in other words, deaths caused by the actions we take to soothe our stressed-out lives. The results include such tragedies as suicide, opioid overdoses, liver cirrhosis, and heart disease.

At work, according to the most recent data, less than 16 percent of us are fully engaged, with the rest of us just selling our time and our talent and getting compensated for our trouble. In the worst extremes of always-on, high-stress jobs, such as distribution centers, emergency room nursing, and teaching, incidences of PTSD are higher than they are for veterans returning from war zones. Imagine that. We’ve created work conditions that are so blind to the needs of each human being that they wind up experiencing more soul-destroying distress than soldiers who’ve witnessed the killing and harming of other human beings.

We’ve not done this deliberately, of course, but it has happened nonetheless to millions of us.

Myshel’s Journal

Finding your way back to who you really are will be a lifetime’s journey, requiring lots of strength to fight off all those forces—sometimes well intentioned, sometimes not—trying to pull you off your path.1

But at least it’s you you’re fighting for. You have some measure of control over your actions and reactions.

What can be far harder is when you see someone you love losing themselves.

Have you had that experience?

You can deal with whatever life throws at you, but when someone you love reveals the pain they’re going through, or the abuse they’ve suffered, you find yourself ambushed by wave upon wave of emotion. Shock, as you try to make sense of what you’re hearing. Confusion, as you try to reconcile this past pain with the person sitting in front of you, the person you thought you knew. Rage that this person could be hurt, or could hurt themselves, suffer by themselves, get so lost by themselves, with no one there to help them.

Grief, too, that you can’t go back and fix it for them. You want to reach over and squeeze them so tightly that they’ll never feel lost again. You want to find that small, broken part of them and piece it back together and show them that it’s all right now, that the person deep inside is whole again, happy again. It may even be that they now seem fine with it all—but you find yourself waking up at night, replaying their suffering, weeping silently at 3 a.m. at how desolate they must have felt, how desperately alone.

Myshel is my fiancée. She was a colleague of mine. I’d known her for five years before we started dating. I fell in love with her for reasons too numerous to explain, but back then if you’d have asked me to describe her, I would have used words like self-assured, joyous, delighted, passionate. It was only after we’d been together for more than a year that she felt safe enough to reveal her story.

It’s not a story of violence. Many, many others have suffered more brutally, as victims of war, displacement, and domestic abuse. Hers is merely a story of loss. Of how with schools and loving parents focused elsewhere, she got so disoriented, so disconnected from herself, so contorted and twisted that after a decade of suffering she was a week, perhaps a month, from dying.

I’m sharing her story not because it’s remarkable, but because it isn’t. Here’s what Myshel wrote in her journal:

The data confirms that what happened to Myshel will happen to many millions of us. Not necessarily the eating disorder, but the losing of yourself. Your experiences at home, and then school, and then work can push your loves further and further away from you until one day you are unmoored—fighting the very food on your plate, panicking at the sight of your smiling work colleagues, bawling your eyes out in front of a college counselor because he asks a few questions about you and then simply listens.

To find our way back to those parts of us that get buried beneath the world and all the other people within it, we need to lay bare what’s causing so many of us to get lost in the first place. Because this mass losing of self, this epidemic of alienation, isn’t happening by accident. It’s the inevitable outcome of a system actively designed to separate you from you.

Lost and Found

“Hey, Dad, what’s the difference between a trapezoid and a rectangle?”

“Er … ”

Sitting with my sixteen-year-old daughter to help her with her geometry, it was clear just how much effort had gone into the curriculum designed to teach her this particular aspect of math. Here she had to parse the similarities between a parallelogram and a rhombus, describe the characteristics of an isosceles as compared with an equilateral triangle, and learn how to calculate the area under a straight line. And then a curved line. It was dauntingly detailed, a yearslong program of precise terms, methods, functions, practices, and conventions.

No one has yet put this sort of thinking and lesson design into those skills that’ll help my daughter live her fullest life. All the questions that will wake her up when she’s thirty, or that’ll wake you up when you’re that age—What are her loves? Is she being true to them? How can she channel her loves toward her contribution at work? How can she use what she loves to draw strength from life? How can she explain her loves to her partner without bragging, or see the loves of others without judging?—are missing from her training. In high school. In college. At work.

She’s just supposed to figure it out for herself.

Yes, sure, she may hear a Steve Jobsian commencement address, or listen to a compelling podcast, but she’ll find nothing that approaches the level of rigor of her geometry class. Which is odd, and for a parent, super-worrying. Just as it is for an employer—the ones who will wind up hiring someone who is close to clueless about how to contribute their very best.

Don’t misunderstand. I’m a big fan of geometry. And trigonometry. And statistics. As a researcher by training and disposition—a data nerd—I can never pay enough attention to numbers: which ones are valid, which are reliable, how they can be used to reveal the contours and beauty of life. But a) my daughter isn’t me, and b) even if she was, the most detailed math class in the world—or history class, or French, or creative writing, or any other skills class she might take—would be irrelevant to helping her learn how to live out the most fulfilling and productive version of her own life.

Actually, for you—and for my daughter—it’s worse than mere irrelevance. These institutions—high school, college, work—are built in such a way as to distract your attention from your unique loves and loathes, and instead convince you that there’s nothing enduringly unique about you. They’re purpose-built to persuade you that you’re an empty vessel, and that your chief challenge in life is to fill this empty vessel with the skills, knowledge, grades, and degrees required to climb to the next rung on the ladder.

More than likely, your life didn’t start off this way. You were made with love, and though many of us experience childhood trauma, your parents surely intended for your first years to be love-filled. They gazed at you as a toddler, delighting in your curls, your giggles, your teetering and twirling and dashing and tumbling, and they dreamed of your future. They looked for all that was right and best about you. They saw in their mind’s eye the biggest, most beautiful image of you, and they cherished it, holding it so close to their hearts that they ached with love for you and all that you could become. You were the center of their world, the foundation of all morality, all ethics, all joy. You—your unique loves and how they might grow—were the point. And when they asked themselves “Will she be happy? How can I help her? How can I guide her, hold her, comfort her, lift her up when she falls?” they knew that, to all these questions, love was the answer.

Then you got a little older, you went to school, and there it began: love, deliberately drained from your life.

You sat in loveless classrooms where your uniqueness was submerged beneath the relentlessness of standardized testing. Who you were on the inside was subordinated to all that you were required to be from the outside. Learning became merely information transfer and confirmation, where the project was to fill you with facts and skills, and your level of fullness was periodically checked by testing. The best student was the fullest.

At home, your parents too appeared to have been drawn into this loveless world, worrying about the questions of growing up: What percentile was your weight, your height, what grade level were you reading at, how was your emotional intelligence at birthday parties? So many new questions, almost as if your parents were being rated on your ability to be a normal, well-adjusted, ninetieth-percentile child. Through your actions, their reputations were at risk. Their love for who you really were turned into fear of who you really were, and whether you would measure up. Whether they would measure up.

Then years later, as a college graduate, you were hired by organizations that were equally fixated on how full your “vessel” was and how much fuller—with skills, experiences, credentials—it could be.

Here in the world of work, you were now introduced to:

• Goals imposed on you from above
• Detailed job descriptions that define the required skills for the optimal job candidate
• Feedback tools that give your peers and boss the right to judge you against this list of required skills—and, if you are found to be missing a few of them, that lead to yet more skills training to fill up your vessel
• Performance reviews that measure you against these skills and give you a year-end rating and an individual development plan to record how you need to do better next year
• Career paths that prescribe the few routes you are allowed to use to climb the ladder
• Concepts such as “growth mindset,” which seem benign initially, but in essence tell you that there’s nothing unique inside your vessel, and that success for you will come only if you believe that you can pour anything into your vessel if you have enough “grit” or “deliberate practice”

None of the above has anything to do with who you are on the inside. The uniqueness of what you love or loathe is beside the point. Instead, you are—from school on into the world of work—assessed against a set of models. You are judged not by how intelligently you’ve cultivated your unique loves, but by how closely you’ve matched the models.

So, in truth, you won’t just get lost. You’ll get hidden—and by the very institutions that are supposed to reveal you. Little wonder we’re facing such an epidemic of lost people.

Loves Labor Lost

Why do they do this? Why do schools and workplaces not take your loves seriously? Why do they not make a point of teaching you your own love language, and helping you turn your loves into contribution? Why do they instead push you to a place where you are cut off from yourself? Why do they subject you to this sort of relentless pressure to conform? Why do they not start with you, the individual, and then follow you down through all the doorways and hallways and secret passages of your unique loves and loathes?

When Myshel hid under the table so she could indulge her love of color and pattern, she knew there was something in this that she loved. Where did this love go? Why wasn’t anyone curious about her loves? Why didn’t anyone ask her which sorts of patterns she loved the most and why? Why didn’t anyone look into the precise detail of her loves and help her see how to begin turning these into a contribution or a learning? Why didn’t anyone teach her how to use her daily experience at school, or later at work, to add even more specificity to her loves and what she could make with them?

Why didn’t anyone take that approach with Myshel, as they did with the thousands of students in Donnie’s class and the school where he works? Why was the one-hour conversation with him the very first time this sort of learning opportunity had been provided—to ask students open-ended questions and listen—not correct, not advise, just listen—to the vividness of their answers?

Were the students shedding tears of relief that someone had finally stopped trying to fill them up and instead was showing curiosity about what was already there? Was it the release of being seen and heard without having to serve up the “right” answer? Or were they tears of sadness and regret that they could no longer remember themselves—what they loved, how they made choices, when was the last time a day flew by?

Our institutions are not doing it maliciously; schools don’t actively want their students to be alienated and stressed, just as companies don’t want their employees to be lost and inauthentic.

They do it—this building of loveless schools and workplaces—because they think they’re being pragmatic. Schools are designed to produce students who can perform well on standardized tests. Workplaces are designed to ensure that everyone in the same role performs it in the same way, so that products and service experiences are all delivered at the same level of quality.

What value does your unique pattern of loves have in a world where the project of school and work is to create uniform outcomes? To the pragmatist, it has zero value. More accurately, it has negative value. Your unique loves are seen as an obstacle to what schools and workplaces are trying to produce. Success, for them, is tightly linked to when they’ve ground your loves out of you—hence the standardized testing at school, and the prescribed goals, skills, attributes, and career paths at work.

All of which would make so much sense if you were indeed an empty vessel. If your unique pattern of loves and loathes was indeed completely malleable. If you really could acquire any skills or attributes you wanted if you just practiced enough. If the uniqueness of you—which felt so true for you at age eleven—was just a childhood delusion. If growing up really just meant growing out of your loves and replacing them with whatever uniform ones your school or work required.

But, of course, this is all wrong: you are not, nor will you ever be, an empty vessel. No one forced Myshel to sit under that table and draw colors and shapes. Her sister didn’t want to do that, and she didn’t want Myshel to do it either. Nor did her mother. But Myshel did want to; she felt a need to. And that need never went away.

None of Donnie’s students are empty vessels. They authentically share with him because, finally, someone is seeing them. Someone is allowing them to say, “Hey, this is me. I’ve already got some loves and loathes. Please look at what’s inside me. And don’t correct me. Don’t tell me how to break my patterns. Help me see my patterns. And then, maybe, you can help me know how I can make the most of them.”

For me, for Myshel, for those students, for all of us, it hurts so much to be unseen. At its very core, this epidemic of lost students and alienated workers stems from being lied to: you’re told your loves aren’t real.

Well, it can’t continue this way. If teachers are to offer students something more than a shoulder to cry on, if Myshel is to come out from under the table, if you are to step boldly into the very best of who you are, then we must make changes. We must find ways to put love back into our lives—into our schools and our workplaces, our parenting and our relationships.

Each one of us is different. As the Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw reminds us, “Treating different things the same can generate as much inequality as treating the same things differently.”2

She was referring primarily to racial and economic inequality, but her insight applies more broadly. Schools and workplaces that insist on treating all of us the same are sources of oppression. Now is the time to stop this oppression and devise better schools, more intelligent workplaces. It’s up to all of us.

And it begins not with these institutions, but with you taking your own loves seriously.

What follows is a road map for how to do that. How to embark on your journey, the names of the devils you’ll meet along the way, and the tools you’ll need to outwit them. So, saddle up, strap in, and let’s go create for you a more powerful, more authentic and more loving way of living.