Getting Over Ourselves: Moving Beyond a Culture of Burnout, Loneliness, and Narcissism

By Christina Congleton

Move beyond empty “life hacks” to connect with your deepest humanity

In Getting Over Ourselves: Moving Beyond a Culture of Burnout, Loneliness, and Narcissism, human development specialist and leadership coach Christina Congleton delivers an insightful and urgently needed discussion of how people can break out of the tired cliches of the self-help genre, and move toward new levels of connection, engagement, and capacity in navigating an uncertain world.

In the book, you'll explore how modern attitudes of individualism that were once freeing now converge with environmental destruction, inequality, and an alarming uptick in depression, substance abuse, and suicide to significantly damage the potential of people everywhere. You'll also find concrete strategies—rooted in developmental psychology—that show us new ways to approach these challenging times.

Getting Over Ourselves offers:

• Insights into why “life hacks,” productivity seminars, and more “adulting” are not the solutions to the issues faced by people today
• Frameworks that reject the idea that there is a separate, solitary self in need of constant improvement, and connect you with your deepest humanity
• Effective techniques for fending off burnout and ways to move beyond the unsatisfactory status quo

An essential and timely work, Getting Over Ourselves is the antidote to the skin-deep, ineffective “self-help” material that you've been looking for.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Nov 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9781394169863

Book preview

GETTING OVER OURSELVES

Moving Beyond a Culture of Burnout, Loneliness, and Narcissism

CHRISTINA CONGLETON

Logo: Wiley

Copyright © 2024 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data

Names: Congleton, Christina, author.

Title: Getting over ourselves : moving beyond a culture of burnout, loneliness, and narcissism / Christina Congleton.

Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : Wiley, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023027945 (print) | LCCN 2023027946 (ebook) | ISBN 9781394169856 (cloth) | ISBN 9781394169870 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781394169863 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Self‐actualization (Psychology) | Burn out (Psychology)

Classification: LCC BF637.S4 C6553 2024 (print) | LCC BF637.S4 (ebook) | DDC 158.1—dc23/eng/20230707

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023027945

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023027946

Cover Design: PAUL MCCARTHY

Cover Images: GETTY IMAGES: © FRANKRAMSPOTT

This book is dedicated to those who will inherit tomorrow the outcomes of our choices and imaginings today—Ana, George, Lennox, Lola, Olivia, Oscar, Preston, Sebastian, Trey, Tycho, Xavier, and Zuri, to name a few.

Acknowledgments

I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to write this book. While I am the only author on the cover, I know this book's existence is really a confluence of influences and efforts. There are a great number of people I could acknowledge. Here's an attempt.

I would like to thank Sally Baker for impeccable timing and for helping me begin to turn a vision into reality. Big thanks to everyone at Wiley—especially Tom Dinse, Deborah Schindlar, Susan Geraghty, and Victoria Savanh—for reading, editing, answering questions, and helping keep everything on track. Thanks also to Lauren Sharp and Chelsey Heller for early correspondence and help with my book ideas, and to Dave Ratner for helping me understand contracts. All of the images you see inside this book were adapted and drawn by the talented artist and designer Yvonne Blanco, with whom I'm very grateful to partner.

I'd like to thank every scientist who contributed to the information contained in this book. I know a single scientific study often takes years of work by a whole team of people. Thank you for the work you do. Thanks especially to Drs. David Gow, Sara Lazar, and Pilyoung Kim for giving me opportunities to understand science firsthand. Deep bows of gratitude to all the brilliant scholars of human development, particularly Robert Kegan for your inspiring teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I am grateful to Katie Heikkinen, EdD, for reviewing the material on psychological development with her keen expertise. Thank you also Professor Ronald Heifetz for your impactful experiential course at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and for teaching me to use The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo‐European Roots to understand deep meaning in language, a practice that stayed with me and that permeates this book.

I'm fortunate to have been a student of the Diamond Approach (DA) for a number of years—thank you to every teacher I have worked with—particularly Gina Crago, Anne Laney, and Andreas Mouskos for your commitment to teaching. I have benefited greatly from it. Big thanks to my small group led by Chris Krueger, as well as the training group that was led by Marilyn Giglio, and really all the DA groups I've been part of—it's a gift to be in the company of real truth‐seekers. And thanks, of course, to Hameed Ali, Karen Johnson, and your fellow early explorers for bringing a pioneering path of realization into the world.

I am indebted to colleagues Janice Muñiz, Heather Andersen, Rebecca Ghanadan, Susan David, and Sandra Ellison for opening important doors in my career. Sandra, I think it was from you that I first heard the term toxic achiever. Deep appreciation to the team at Cascade Leadership Partners—Jack Jefferies, Gisele Garcia Shelley, Mark Smith, and also Liz Lewis, Dana Feehan, and Shannon Pilcher—your belief in me has enabled me to author and reauthor myself in amazing ways. Thanks also to the outstanding organization that is the Center for Creative Leadership and every individual I get to work with there—I am so fortunate to be part of it. And to every client I have the opportunity work with—thank you for allowing me to do what I love—and for teaching me so much and helping me grow.

Thank you to Hope Robertson, Farooq Malik, and Kate Azrak, as well as Julia Dengel and Michael Jaro—heart friends in difficult times. Thanks, Hope, for teaching me about biodiversity and telling me about honeybees and almond trees. Thanks also to the many leadership coaching colleagues who help me learn and enrich my world: Jackie Kindall, Zitty Nxumalo, Minji Wong, Elise Foster, all of Poyee Dorrian's supervision group, and so many more.

Thank you to Rania Khan for being an incredible person and friend. Thanks Johanna Congleton, for being my sister and looking over some of the information in the book that falls within your expertise, and to our late parents for their love and commitment to us. Thank you to my mother‐in‐law, Lori Artiomow, for helping out while I was writing. Thank you Ms. Ashley and Ms. Ash, and everyone at school, for creating a loving and magical holding environment for my son during the year I was working on this book. Finally, thank you to my son for being the light of my life, and my husband, Alex, for bringing his own brilliance to the ideas in this book and also doing some of the grunt work; for being my first sounding board, reader, editor, and supporter; for all the large and small ways you made the creation of this book possible—belonging to our family means the world to me.

Introduction

Welcome.

Let me begin with some strange invitations to our journey: I hope this book makes you uncomfortable. I hope it disappoints you at times. I hope this book helps you give up.

But more than this, I hope this book helps you fully remember, or maybe experience for the first time, the you that can be with that discomfort and disappointment; a you who gives up on what you know isn't needed; a you with wide, generous arms who knows how to embrace what is before you, including your failures to embrace. Not a new you. Not an improved you. An available you—available to the beauty life is offering and the difficulty it is presenting, available to exuberant play, and laughter, and disagreement, and heated debate, and relaxation, and celebration, and perhaps quite a bit of hard work.

Most of all, I hope this book helps you be available to friendship. I think that's what is most needed at this time. I don't know whether we need friends for the end of the world or for the beginning, or both at the same time. There is so much uncertainty and complexity right now, it's impossible to tell how things will go. But whatever happens, wouldn't it be nice to have a friend, or many, at your side? Or, if you are more inclined toward solitude, to know there is a friend somewhere, holding you close at heart?

In that spirit, my intention in writing this book is not to be an expert or authority, but rather a companion. It's called Getting Over Ourselves and not Getting Over Yourself, for a reason. I am in this with you. I wrote this book because I wanted to get over my self, and I knew that putting it in my own words would help me find the pathways I was looking for. Now I invite you along with me.

This book is presented in three parts and nine chapters. Part I considers the urgency of our times, and presents the idea that human beings may be on the edge of new psychological and cultural potentials. Chapter 1 looks at connections between environmental precariousness and human stress in Western culture, and describes how shifts toward hyper‐individualization that began in the late 1970s and early 1980s are dominating the state of our world today. Chapter 2 takes the millennial generation as a case study in how these shifts have shaped the experience of self, and specifically looks at millennial stereotypes including selfie generation, lonely, burnout, and lost. Chapter 3 goes into the deeper history of our hyper‐individualized Western society, and connects this history to established models of psychological development. Chapter 4 takes us to the cutting edge of Western psychological development, and considers what it means in the context of a postmodern, post‐truth world.

Part II explores how the challenges we face might also contain the medicine we need, cracking open millennial stereotypes and understanding these pain points as doorways to deeper truths. We explore selfies and self‐realization, loneliness and oneness, burnout and wholeheartedness, and being lost and liberated, in Chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8, respectively. I present practices you can try for yourself, and potentially anchor into, to help navigate novel forms of meaning‐making and unfamiliar ways of relating.

Finally, in a brief Part III, I consider how we can be good friends between worlds—the world we know today and a world we might live into. We look not at the what but the how of reimagining our world, by coming together with slowness, deep listening, and fierce love.

Overall, this book looks at the ways we Westerners are often constrained by our small, isolated, stressed, neoliberal selves. Getting over our selves does not entail losing our selves, but rather expanding into a more relaxed, connected sense of who we are. In fact, getting over our selves doesn't mean losing much of anything. And we have so much to gain—including finding ways to preserve our sensitive, highly interconnected planet for the generations to come.

One of the things this journey invites us into is being with paradox. When our mind needs room for contradiction, poetry is often a better entryway than prose. Rainer Maria Rilke was a poet who handled paradox well, probably because he himself lived through strong polarities. Born in Prague in 1875 to a mother who was grief‐stricken by the prior loss of a baby daughter, Rilke was initially raised as a girl. Then at age 10 he was sent by his emotionally distant father to military school. After finding his calling as a poet, Rilke composed The Book of Hours as arguably improper love letters to an older married woman and transcendent Love Poems to God.

You, sent out beyond your recall, / go to the limits of your longing. / Embody me, Rilke wrote in poem I 59. Flare up like a flame / and make big shadows I can move in. / Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. / Just keep going. No feeling is final.1

These times on earth seem to be calling us to venture beyond our recall—to the limits of our knowing and our longing. It's a time when we must be willing to flare like flames and make big shadows; and we need to keep going.

Rilke died almost exactly 100 years ago, in 1926 at the age of 51. He completed The Book of Hours before he was 28 years old. Thus, in keeping with the theme of paradox, this poem simultaneously invokes the wisdom of an ancestor offering some guidance, and the energy of a young adult raising the sails as we set out.

Rilke ended I 59 with the words, Nearby is the country they call life. / You will know it by its seriousness. / Give me your hand. (See the Notes section at the end of the book for the original German.) Here, I extend my hand to you. Let's see what we find out together.

Notes

Original lines from Rilke's poem in Das Stunden‐Buch, I59:

Von deinen Sinnen hinausgesandt, / geh bis an deiner Sehnsucht Rand; / gib mir Gewand. / Hinter den Dingen wachse als Brand, / daß ihre Schatten ausgespannt / immer mich ganz bedecken. / Laß dir alles geschehn: Schönheit und Schrecken. / Man muß nur gehn: Kein Gefühl ist das fernste.

Nah ist das Land, / das sie das Leben nennen. / Du wirst es erkennen / an seinem Ernste. / Gib mir die Hand.

References

1. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God. Riverhead Books, 1996.

Part I

The Urgency to Get Over Our Selves

The real problem is in the minds and hearts of men. We will not change the hearts of other men by mechanisms, but by changing our hearts and speaking bravely.

Albert Einstein, New York Times, 1946, on the threat of nuclear war

Let us stand up. Let us be a concerned generation. Let us remain awake through a great revolution.

Martin Luther King Jr., Oberlin College, June 1965, on racial injustice and social change

The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy … and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation.

James Gustave Speth on the environmental crisis

Chapter 1

A World on Edge

We know it is time to wake up. The planet is growing feverish, with scientists predicting disastrous consequences if we cannot curb the increase in global temperature. Poisoned air kills millions of people every year. Extinction rates are accelerating. Our oceans are rising, acidifying and swirling with garbage, their fish so overrun with plastic it ends up on our dinner tables and in our bloodstreams.

In 2019 Greta Thunberg addressed world leaders at the UN Climate Action Summit. There were amused murmurings from the crowd as the petite 16‐year‐old began to speak, but the tone in the room quickly grew sober. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you! Thunberg accused. You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency … How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just ‘business as usual’ and some technical solutions? … The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.¹

Yet change is slow to arrive. People are increasingly conscious of the existential threats Thunberg described, but we can't seem to get a handle on it. For example, roughly 70% of those surveyed by Yale and George Mason Universities in 2019 agreed that global warming was happening, were worried about it, and described it as personally important, with the youngest respondents reporting the greatest concern. A far smaller number of people, however, were willing to donate money, volunteer, or contact government officials about the issue. Only about 10% said they had taken action.²

From time to time the world's attention is captured by a clarion call to wake up, as in Thunberg's address, and we're shaken from the trance of the status quo. But the sense of urgency always dissipates. There is a familiar wave of alarm and excitement that crests into entertainment, meme‐making, then dips toward banality and boredom. The wake‐up call recedes from consciousness. It's like the alarm goes off, we rouse a little, and hit snooze once again.

I use the term we broadly, for all of human beings—but especially Western human beings from industrialized areas—because I believe the environmental crisis is demanding a widespread, more fundamental examination of our human condition. It's clear that some groups of people are profiting from environmental destruction while others are exploited, and we need to face this and make corrections. Still, I don't think it helps for some of us to claim we are awake and point at others as asleep. The story of us and them is a story of separation and competition, driven by the same kind of thinking that contributes to the destruction we must reduce. Our task now is to tell a story of mutual awakening and togetherness. If there's one thing that has become clear to me through my years of research and work with people, it's that we need each other.

Paradise Burning

Poet Robert Frost pondered whether the world would end in fire or ice. From what we know of melting glaciers and recent observations of earth's hottest years on record, the odds are clearly in fire's favor.

A 2022 UN report shows changing patterns in wildfire activity, including record‐breaking fire seasons in previously low‐risk areas like the Arctic and the Amazon rainforest. The report predicts a 30% to almost 60% increase in wildfire events by the end of the century due to climate, land‐use, and population change. Disastrously, scientists anticipate that as wildfires destroy critical carbon sinks such as peatlands and rainforests, they will accelerate the positive feedback loop in the carbon cycle, making it more difficult to halt rising temperatures.³ Each fire tilts us further toward a steep hill, while simultaneously rendering our brakes less and less effective.

The reality of increasing fire activity hit home in the United States in recent years with particularly brutal wildfire seasons in the West and Southwest. In late 2018 the deadly Camp Fire burned through Butte County in Northern California, violently erasing the towns of Concow and Paradise.

Three years later, between Christmas and New Year's day of 2021, my husband and I watched the orange glow of the Marshall Fire out on the horizon, burning 30 miles north of our home. The fire consumed over 1,000 structures in Boulder County in a matter of hours, making it the most disastrous in Colorado history in terms of lost property. It ravaged houses and business centers in its suburban path of destruction. It burned the spiritual center we frequented to the ground. It killed two people. Although the links between this winter grassland fire and climate change are less clear than California's Camp Fire or even Colorado's 2020 Cameron Peak Fire that burned a record 208,663 acres, Colorado's climate‐related drought conditions likely played a factor in the blaze.⁴

Symbolically, fire has many positive connotations. It can represent the beauty of purification and transformation, a sense of eternity, hope, or spiritual passion. But it can also point to destructive desire (as in Frost's Fire and Ice), obsession, madness, and the infernos of hell.

In recent years, intellectuals and activists have increasingly pointed to connections between the warming climate and the flames of human desire that sustain today's capitalist systems. Harvard Business School professor Rebecca Henderson begins her 2020 book Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by personalizing the decline of the world's forests for which she has a deep and abiding love. Referring to her early career as a consultant who helped businesses profit, Henderson states, "my