How do we stop outsourcing our sense of safety to systems that don’t care if we’re alive?

I met a guardian tonight

Tonight, I met a guardian who has been diligently working in the shadows my entire life to keep me safe. This part of me has endeavored for decades to battle risks that threaten my security. It says “stay where it’s predictable”— protected in environments I know, where my value to others isn’t a question, where I earn good salary, maintain a clean-ish resume, and sense “I am being responsible.”

Its job is to hold me in places and patterns of being that I’ve proven help me to survive.

No cost is too great for this survival mission — even shrinking my life for safe belonging.
…
Belonging-in-safety is, after all, one of our most basic needs.

Is safe belonging at odds with creative liberation?

What is “safe”?
For years I’ve felt myself at odds — part of me yearning to come alive, yet consistently unable to liberate the spark within.
Little did I know, a bargain had been made by some other version of me.

This guardian is not my nemesis, but an ally forged long ago.

There is a curious tie in here between the bargain made for my safety and a broader bargain at scale of the economy.

Myth

The word brings to mind Joseph Campbell, the Hero’s Journey, and Star Wars.

In a galaxy far-far away, a dominant myth is challenged, cracked, and broken wide open by a new myth — one that celebrates the creative liberation and peaceful coming together of all peoples, places, and natures.

Many of you have a guardian not so different from the one I met — and they are all subject to the over-bearing power of our collective economic myth: SAFETY IS OBEDIENCE — stay in line, go in debt to follow one of many prescribed paths, and you shall be rewarded with money to pay off debts, fuzzy promises of joyous retirement, and better life for your kids.

Side note: Our emerging and much healthier world will be full of elders/more-experienced-fellow-travelers who are at-the-ready to work with us and our guardians earlier in life; liberating and inviting us to walk our guardian-parts into new, even more glorious and rewarding roles.

The Great Economic Excuse to Bargain our Souls

We trade

• our aliveness
• creative risk
• spiritual growth &
• love-led work

For

• a “respectable” resume
• predictable income
• a story that makes our guardians feel calm:
  • “We are being responsible. We are safe. We are not crazy.”

The system feeds our guardians like their hooked up to IVs of strawberry milkshake re-affirming the paradigm:

• Language like
  • Are you “marketable?”
  • What does your “career progression” look like?
  • What is your “earning potential”?
• Fears like
  • “If my work history looks weird, I’ll struggle to get hired.”
• Notice the remarkable dis-incentive for (uber-meaningful) work roles that are among the lowest paid:
  • Full-of-heart
  • high-care
  • Generative
• Incessant celebrations of promotions-for-promotions sake, etc.

The current economy rewards what builds GDP, not what builds soul capacity.

The more heart-centered the work, the lower the “market value” tends to be.

Why do we serve something that has no heart of service?

The Structure That Needed Me Broken

I have spent some recent years in a role where I (like many of my coworkers) overfunction to compensate for broken systems, full of departments that should own processes but instead offload accountability (not through a particular fault of their people, but a failure of the system to define roles and responsibilities and to hold space to honor the breath and creative ability of the people executing the work.)

I learned that by becoming unofficial scaffolding to hold the chaos together, contorting my creative, emotional, and mental self, I could ensure my security.

As a child, I stabilized the emotional field in my household, compensated for adults’ unresolved stuff (let’s all go to therapy, please — for the sake of the little ones). I learned to survive through cooperation, adaptation, and competence.
Eg. What do you need? I’ve got it. I will draw on my resource, be it physical, mental, emotional, spiritual.. To hold the peace.

Naturally, I carried this right into my adulthood, repeating that pattern at work: “proving value” by enduring dysfunction, stretching myself as Loki, holding together the multiverse.

The system eats people with this nature up: expendable chaos buffers.
Our souls, on the other hand, cry for liberation.

The new generations of workers already know this.

• Job hopping is 100% on the table.
• “Staying 10–20 years for loyalty” is no longer the gold standard.
• They intuitively refuse to give decades to misaligned structures.

What we are living/seeing is an agreement with aliveness.
They’re instinctively less willing to feed the guardian at the cost of the soul.

The story we’ve been sold (“stick it out or you’re irresponsible”) is not a law of nature — it’s just habit compelled by longstanding and unresolved protectors within us.

What happens when we stay? (The True Risk)

I sketch during my morning espresso.

It’s an essential ritual for me — small pad (A7 or such), small pen (I have this delightful little “uni-ball one” that pleasantly clips onto most any clothing.

A few days ago, I wrote: “I came here to die… and in dying, leave death.”

We don’t need anyone’s permission to leave death — but the choice to recognize our environment as toxic and commit to the work of coming alive is… well, overwhelming if you are, as I was, already buried.

So the bell rings, and will continue to ring.

The invitation to step will be here, and always will be here.

Our guardians have their job, and if yours is tasked to keep you safe and not go causing a ruckus in life, it’ll be damned if you go waking up and prancing your creative self around in ways that offend the gods of the great economic myth.

Gabe’s advice? Softly invite you guardians to consider:

• “What happens if I keep staying where I am already dying?”
• “Are you willing to see what a more liberated life looks like, one with the frightening promise of being unknown to us know, but one I sense will be rewarding in ways we can’t possibly know until we are in it?”
• “Do you believe that at some point, staying becomes more dangerous to the soul than leaving is to the resume?”

Gabe’s Journey toward a New Agreement: Inner Economy before Outer Economy

We all have different natures and designs. The invitations is to discover what is motivating your guardian and what might open it up to resigning from that particular post. Mine had “kept” me in certain patterns across work, school community, relationship that kept me doing other peoples’ jobs, boundaries fuzzy, commitments & expectations unclear, long-term constructive agreements difficult… and more.

For me, these permissions I have given my guardian resonated and are striking a deep vein, reframing how I see where I am in life.

• It’s safe to stop absorbing what does not see me.
• It’s safe to stop carrying work that isn’t mine
• It’s safe to leave this role as a survival strategy

My reframing involves challenging the narrative of the economic myth — moving
from “Will the system keep paying me?”
toward “What does it look like to come alive?”

Responsibility needs a definition check

I am choosing to be responsible to myself in ways that liberate my creative spirit. What does this look like? It’s a daily quest, but it involves

• listening to my body,
• operating from a centered place (not forward/overextended),
• honoring commitments to myself and
• setting clear boundaries…

It certainly involves a withdrawal from my primary responsibilities being to

• a paycheck
• someone else’s spreadsheet
• A system that wouldn’t attend my funeral

I am choosing to be responsible to myself in ways that liberate my creative spirit. What does this look like? It’s a daily quest, but it involves

Here are some shadow-work questions for anyone reading to entertain:

• What part of you is your inner guardian?
  • What does it say when you even imagine stepping out of your current structure?
• What does your body feel like on Sunday night or Monday morning?
  • Is that feeling worth treating as “normal”?
• Where are you over-functioning to hold together a system that would gladly replace you?
• If you believed you would “make it” no matter what — what would you no longer tolerate?
• What would “leaving death” look like in your life in the next 6–12 months?
  • One concrete step, not a whole plan.
• Remix/Flip/Reframe this to be more accessible:
  • “What does one small step of aliveness look like in the next 3 days?”

I’ll close with a blessing to my guardian:

Dear ally in my life,
Great protector,
Thank you for your tireless service for my safety in life.

I invite you to step from that old role into a new horizon.

I invite you take on a new responsibility of holding open the channel for my creative liberation.

I believe you are perfect for the job 🙂

You just might discover a new understanding of safety in stewarding the liberation of creative spirit 😉