try softer

I’ve been sitting with the idea that, in Western society, our first go at adulthood is almost always off.
Not because we’ve necessarily done something wrong—but because most of us never had a real chance to become soul-initiated adults in this environment. So instead of being adults who live from a profound encounter with the truth at our very center, we become something else entirely.

Soul-initiated adults are extremely rare in our world today. This was not always so. Indigenous cultures across the globe held practices that supported psycho-spiritual maturation, understanding it as essential to the preservation of culture itself. Much of this wisdom, however, has been violently destroyed or actively suppressed.

In more recent history, the global West has played a central role in the domination and suppression of Indigenous peoples. Consider Nestlé’s coercive marketing campaigns between 1950 and 1970, which targeted Indigenous mothers in Central America—shaming breastfeeding and offering free samples of formula. When the samples ran out, many mothers had lost their milk supply, and their babies suffered from malnutrition due to the high cost of formula and the need to mix it with contaminated water.

Was this malicious? Or was it the result of an immature, irresponsible capitalist agenda—blindly pursuing profit and conquest of an untapped market? And if blindness played a role, how might we now be living inside a late-stage capitalist version of that same blindness?

As I’ve learned to become less obedient to the capitalist ideal, I’ve gained a greater ability—at least some of the time—to distinguish my own inner voice from the loud, insistent voices competing for my attention. Western society is a barrage of sensationalized, attention-grabbing detritus generated by the distraction economy to profit from human misery. Once caught in this loop—most often through economic necessity—it becomes very difficult to break free.

This brings to mind the words attributed to Jesus when a wealthy person asked how to “enter heaven.” “Give away everything you have,” he said. “For it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

In our first adulthood, many of us are either conforming to or rebelling against the Western capitalist ideal—both of which shape our lives profoundly. Over time, the psyche begins to send quiet signals to the body, the mind, or through our behavior, picked up by those who know us: something is not well.

We lack a cultural framework for anticipating these signals, which often first arise in our teens or twenties. What we do have, in abundance, are ways to drown them out—to numb uncertainty, avoid pain, suppress longing, and construct an even more impenetrable persona. You might pause here and notice the ways you’ve learned to avoid slowing down and making space for doubt, pain, or desire. You might notice whether you feel trapped in a system more interested in extracting from you than caring for your life.

The learned response—especially promoted and maintained by white men in Western society—is to focus relentlessly on upward ascent. When life becomes difficult, we are taught to try harder. This is what many of us learned from our fathers, who learned it from theirs. We come to believe that if we don’t climb this ladder through sheer will and effort, we will be left behind—and that our lives will amount to failure.

Because white men have historically occupied positions of power that shaped the modern world, this orientation has left a deep cultural imprint. One that privileges assertive dominance over softness, intuition, and receptivity. I feel this most acutely in large cities, where people rush to get things done because “time is money,” and life becomes a perpetual competition—with other companies, coworkers, or even with one’s own desire to slow down, listen, and become vulnerable.

It is only when we learn to try softer that we can enter the state of being Jesus was pointing toward. This has nothing to do with religion. It has everything to do with being human.

When we begin to give our attention to what is actually happening inside us, we often encounter a landscape of unmet needs. The reflex we’ve been trained in mirrors that tragic Nestlé campaign: to treat the inner life as an untapped market to be efficiently exploited for maximum return. But the soul does not respond to extraction.

To try softer requires a different posture altogether. Much of what happens at the beginning of this shift is about unlearning—noticing old habits, stopping, listening, not knowing, and resisting the urge to find answers. It is the slow unraveling of decades of conditioning. A descent from one way of being, without certainty about what comes next.

In trying softer, we remember our innocence. We learn to trust intuition. We begin to partner with love, trust, and possibility in ways that deepen our sense of belonging to life. This marks the beginning of a very different journey—one that heals the wounds of a dominator culture while also asking us to face our own pain, shame, and profound vulnerability.

We learn to love in ways we never imagined possible.
And we feel, more exquisitely, the sorrow and beauty of being alive in such a troubled time.