n the US it is common to make fun of the French and their unions, their strikes and their 35 hour work weeks. It is easy to forget that the unions are indeed “the folks who brought you the weekend.” I was excited to read Sweden is introducing the six hour work day.

Our relationship to work is all wrong. It is by now a cliché to say that too many of us live to work instead of work to live. But it is true. We have left our children to be taken care of by iPads, and we have limited our own lives to an idea of “productivity” that has simply come up short. Too many of us are not happy.

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I watched Hercules last night. The terrible B movie starring “The Rock.” Don’t ask me how I ended up here. I sat through the annoyance of cliché after cliché. It wasn’t until the movie was done that I got some value from it. Samantha, my wife, who finds something to appreciate in everything, was the one to point it out.

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As a person of color I have experienced direct and explicit aggression as well as significant forms of exclusion. I also experience plenty of microaggressions. As a man who has been culturally conditioned by patriarchy, I have also been the perpetrator of explicit and implicit aggressions. I have been hurt and I have hurt others.

It is unfortunate that we have structured a society in which the power embedded in relationships of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, exclusion and privilege define so much of our human experience.

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We are social animals. We cannot be an isolated self. Affluence allows us to become more and more independent from each other. It allows us to isolate ourselves.

This is the big irony. We are “wealthier” than most people on earth yet we are lonelier than most people on earth. The “stuff” that we buy with our wealth, the “safety” that we buy with our wealth, the “independence” that we buy with our wealth, it all seems to diminish the very thing that gives life meaning - the generative power of human connection. Our wealth is making us scared. Depressed. And small.

David Brooks wrote an awesome column about The Great Affluence Fallacy:

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Today is the 70th anniversary of India’s Independence. The event matters to all of us. Not just because it impacted one out of every five humans walking the planet at the time. But because two centuries of domination by the largest Empire that the world had ever known were finally undone by a revolution that was fundamentally spiritual and had nonviolence at its core.

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We just watched the new take on “The Little Prince” that Netflix released on Friday. I found it beautiful. I loved the art. And I loved the “story within a story.” It is a great way to bring grown ups back to the magic of a fable that we learned to love as children.

I bring it up because the new version offers a sharp critique of a world defined by corporations, “productivity” and standardized education. It reminds us that the most precious things in life cannot be dominated or owned. It reminds us that we have lost too much.

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I’ve been struggling with “movement space.” It feels like the people who are devoting our lives to social transformation are also burdened by an unconscious shadow. This shadow takes the form of judgement and self-righteousness.

The rush to indict and exile is not exclusively applied to “the other.” It’s not just the bad guys who are wrong. The whip of self-righteousness is increasingly applied to those who are in movement with us.

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The traditional activist tends to come at you. It is a straightforward charge backed up by righteousness and facts. It is a worthy passionate stance. And it has its limitations.

The artist comes at you sideways. Good art sneaks up on you. You feel it before you think it.

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I’m just getting back from two weeks at Sundance. I just facilitated two very different gatherings at the intersection of culture, art and justice. There is such a thing as a creative impulse. It is the driving force of evolution itself. It moves through us.

This creative impulse is your desire for purpose and significance. It is the eros that defines your subconscious. It is the thread of all good stories. It is why we thirst for meaning. It is what makes you want to grow, and what allows you to not know.

The creative impulse holds the magic of our aliveness.

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