The Limitations of Surrender

Happy new year? My French colleague, whose style, as you might imagine, is far more sophisticated than mine, told me that in France it’s acceptable to extend New Year’s greetings throughout the entirety of January. So if you, like me, feel like you’re barely getting acclimated to 2026, consider yourself in fashionable company.

My writings over the last year have been less of a recounting of current events and more of a curation of ideas that I’ve found interesting for whatever reason. I’ve not actively been commenting on the news cycle and I intend to keep things that way. But at this particular moment, frankly, it feels impossible to avoid.

I’m heavy-hearted witnessing the murders of innocent American citizens in Minneapolis; I’m deeply sickened by the blatant lies and gaslighting of the federal government. You all are thoughtful, caring, wonderful humans and so I recognize I’m preaching to the choir here. I have no diatribe. All I know is, amidst my oscillating heartache and rage, seeing others raise their voices (whether in person, online, or in the freezing cold) has been my greatest source of consolation and hope. This is simply just an extension of that offer in this meager little corner where I share my thoughts.

There’s something unnerving about the ways in which we bear witness to horror these days: phone in hand, fingers beginning to numb, anger diffusing through our supine bodies as our faces, expressionless, glow from our screens. Sometimes I’m even brushing my teeth, phone balanced delicately on the towel rack — a metaphorical teetering on the brink.

Eventually beyond our screens, we find each other, need each other, in our stumbling attempts to process. And in these conversations I sense that the greatest source of pain and frustration often revolves around wondering what the hell to do. We lob this question in the hope of a satisfying answer that might remind us of the power we possess. And while the answers are never simple, to be clear, they exist — from protests to consumer strikes to supporting community organizations.

Within a moral crisis, I often find myself working through what I guess are spiritual questions regarding the limitations of surrender.

My knowledge of Buddhism is fairly surface level. I’ve not engaged with the primary texts, but there are what I’d call Buddhist-influenced teachers that have resonated with me over the years: Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield, John Tarrant. For someone who was lucky to pull the anxiety disorder card at birth, the Buddhist teachings of acceptance and surrender offer therapeutic benefits and genuine healing. And many of these insights have been scientifically proven to help with the treatment of certain psychological conditions — consider Exposure Response Prevention therapy for OCD, which is essentially a practice of learning to not resist, because what we resist, persists.

Alls to say, these are principles I try (and regularly fail) to live by.

But here’s where I get tripped up: faced with escalating state-sponsored violence and unbearable cruelty I find myself trying to square the concepts of acceptance or surrender with the obvious need for urgent action and resistance. And so, across this spectrum, I sometimes find myself slipping, struggling to find my footing.

While I wasn’t searching for answers to this particular dilemma, I happened to come across a community of online writers who are trying to clarify Buddhism’s moral obligations. Their critique, as I understand it, is that our Western culture often picks these spiritual teachings apart, only keeping the individualistic elements and therefore overlooking the ethical frameworks that are core to these traditions. Consider the fact that so many of these books fall into our “self-help” section — we seemingly lack the categorical language for texts focused on a responsibility to help others.

Liz Bucar is one of these writers, and while I might not yet fully understand the entirety of her argument, I found her comparison of “Engaged Buddhism” to “Secular” and “Traditional” Buddhism to be helpful:

..both secular Buddhism and traditional Buddhism share this inward focus, and neither can deliver what someone concerned with collective justice actually needs. What’s missing is what is called “engaged Buddhism,” a modern movement that reinterprets Buddhist practice toward collective liberation rather than individual enlightenment. A form of Buddhism that says your practice should connect you to collective struggle, not separate you from it.

Traditional Buddhism says: Your discomfort is about your attachments. Look inward. Engaged Buddhism says: Your discomfort might be responding to actual harm. Look outward, investigate, ask others what happened. This inward turn makes sense when the question is about your own expectations or projections. But what if the cause of discomfort actually IS “out there”? In harmful policies, in rising authoritarianism, in people being targeted? Then turning inward becomes a way of not looking at what needs to be seen.

I don’t believe this is meant to minimize the benefits of secular mindfulness for individual contemplation or stress-reduction, but I guess it’s more of an appropriate to challenge to take the ethos of healing further — we can’t stop at ourselves. This brings to mind the loving kindness practice that I’m most familiar with through Sharon Salzberg, which starts with an offering of personal well-being and then gradually expands outwards to all living things.

I learned that we can spot a similar hyper individualization in the evolution of therapy culture over the years, spanning back to the 1950s. In exploring this cultural shift, David Cahn references Philip Rieff’s 1966 book The Triumph of the Therapeutic, which has this eerily prescient observation:

…one of Rieff’s major predictions is that, in the absence of a shared moral framework, charismatic leaders will fill the void. He also anticipates that as more and more people abdicate their civic responsibilities in favor of personal self-fulfillment, an administrative state will gain in power. Our “social ecology” breaks down when individuals view the private sphere as a refuge from the public domain, rather than being integrated with it.

While I’ll admit it can feel like utopian thinking given the state of things, I’d like to at least try to imagine what it might take to counter this trend, how we might appropriately expand our circles of care and maybe (a big maybe) even find some semblance of a shared moral framework.

Just as importantly, we seem to be in need of some reminding that we, collectively, possess the ability to change the course of things. While the feeling of helplessness is all too familiar, it too has its limitations.

There was an article written by Erik Baker I read a few months back that’s been bouncing around my mind: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Shitty Life | Self-Help Gets Philosophical. It’s a thorough, insightful exploration and criticism of a certain realm of self-help and philosophy — much of which I can still genuinely value — that essentially aims to offer relief through advice about accepting things as they are and embracing our limitations. In this genre of advice, our desire for things to be better would be considered the root of all suffering.

As a wide range of social scientists, pollsters, and trendspotters have observed, a sense of fatalism has increasingly suffused the attitudes of many millennials and zoomers. (“Get in, loser,” Cosmopolitan invited readers in 2024. “We’re heading into the void!”) The most straightforward way to cope with hopelessness is to tell yourself that hope was a mistake in the first place. In his 2019 book Everything Is Fucked, the sequel to his 2016 bestseller The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, the self-help guru Mark Manson puts the point with characteristic economy of expression: “Hope Is Fucked.”

I totally get the relief in saying everything is fucked so let’s go touch grass and dance. Even just typing that felt like a weight off my shoulders. But then Baker, goes on to address the dangers in over-subscribing to this type of philosophy — particularly because it undervalues our agency to make a difference. There are serious

At some point, however, I realized that I was spending more of my time thinking about my own despair than about the problems outside myself that were supposedly fueling it. And it seemed to me that a lot of people I knew were doing the same thing. So many conversations centered on how we were doing our best under difficult circumstances… Life is hard, we’d tell ourselves. Rest is resistance. While an exaggerated sense of our own importance is a recipe for both political and psychological disaster, it is also possible to overestimate our insignificance. Acceptance shades easily into excuse. With enough practice tolerating imperfection you can learn to forget what it is you’re failing to live up to... If that seems like an unreasonable standard to hold ourselves to, it is only because so few of us today have experienced the way that participating in the exercise of collective power can augment and extend our personal agency.

Preemptive surrender is no sign of wisdom. Any reality made by human beings can be remade by them. The price of this power is mutual obligation: we can never let ourselves off the hook. The things we can accomplish together are, by definition, within our sphere of control, even if we have to act through structures that are bigger than any of us alone to achieve them…. But for those of us living in the heart of the American empire, with our duly elected president marching our society gleefully into hell, this news is far from reassuring. What we do with our lives does matter — as much as anything possibly could. That should keep us up at night.

Closing quote

I was waiting for something extraordinary to happen, but as the years wasted on nothing ever did unless I caused it - Charles Bukowski

A parting song

Sometimes in songwriting one can get critiqued for being too on the nose. But there are times when we need a song to deliver a punch between the eyes.

We can thank Springsteen for this one, which I’m sure many of you have already come across: Streets of Minneapolis.