Navigating America’s Collective Crisis of Confidence
On our individual and collective transitions, expanding our capacity to move beyond binary thinking, and weaving new stories that can hold us all.
There's a vast territory between what we're trying to leave behind and where we're trying to go and we don't have any maps for that territory" - Charles Eisenstein
I spent the summers of my childhood in my family's ancestral villages in India, playing in the dirt streets during monsoon season, visiting my family farmland that my ancestors farmed on for generations, and sitting on cots listening to the elders tell stories about my ancestors and parent's childhoods.
I spent the other portion of those summers at my dad's motel, which sits at a major highway intersection in rural Pennsylvania, hours from where I grew up. I watched him change the doorknobs of the motel doors and clean the pool that sits at the center of the property. Sometimes I played alone in that pool, sometimes with guests' kids who were passing through on their way to the Midwest, saying goodbye as they continued the second leg of their journeys. I spent time with a local chaplain who served wayfarers - addicts, homeless folks, people escaping tough situations, or just people who were lost in life. I got to know my dad's employees, who had spent their entire lives working on the property and living in that small town.
I was often asked if my sisters came too, but as the youngest, it was just my mom and me in India. Those summers encompassed seeing her life from a different lens - the now older women she went to school with, who she called her best friends, who knew her as she was after marrying my dad at 16. Similarly, at the motel, it was just my dad and me, witnessing the reality of his life there, hearing his stories of first migrating from his village at 16 and his early experiences in the US. Seeing my parents' lives without anyone else there - just them - added color to how I see them today.
I think it's these diverse experiences that have made me a bridge builder. The rich tapestry of experiences that stemmed from growing up in rural and suburban Pennsylvania, my childhood and early adult years in India, followed by Nepal, and now to my most recent years in coastal cities like New York and San Francisco. It wasn’t my parents’ intention, but this has been one of their greatest gifts to me.
In 2016, as we neared the 2017 election, I felt the need for this gift as I landed in Philadelphia, returning after nearly a year in India. In 1979, Jimmy Carter warned of an invisible crisis eating away at America's core - a spiritual deterioration that manifested in citizens' growing doubt about their lives' meaning and the nation's lost sense of purpose. His speech, "Crisis of Confidence", reads like a prophecy for our time (I highly recommend reading the whole thing).
More than four decades later, we find ourselves at a similar inflection point, but with deeper fissures. We've landed on opposite sides of a ring with little willingness or ability to understand, hear, or meet in the middle. It's a deep frustration with a system that hasn't been working, but got us where we are today. The continued ideological divides, the polarization, the inability to truly see each other - these are symptoms of a larger transition we're navigating as a society.
In Vedic scripture, this period is known as Kaliyuga, characterized by spiritual decay and moral degradation. Yet within this darkness lies the seed of transformation. What happens within us reflects what's happening in our world, and vice versa. The fragmentation we see in society - the inability to hold nuance, to see beyond binary thinking - mirrors our own internal disconnections.
What this moment calls for is more bridge-building, and not just across ideological divides. We need bridges across sectors and disciplines, across political and religious beliefs. We need more multi-faceted, nuanced thinking both in our interpersonal lives and at the macro level. As AI enters the picture, we'll need even more people who can think with complexity and nuance, who can work across different disciplines to help us navigate this unprecedented transition.
Ayurvedic Medicine teaches us to see systems wholly - to understand that no story exists in isolation. When we fragment narratives, when we reduce complex human experiences to simplified ideological positions, we lose the very thing that could heal us: our ability to recognize ourselves in each other.
I see this in my current work with CORE Schools, leading a fundraising campaign that serves nearly a million students across California's largest urban public school districts. Our education system was designed for a world that no longer exists. It’s become clear the solution isn't just updating curriculum or adding technology. It's about creating learning ecosystems that can hold the complexity of our moment - spaces where students can learn to navigate change, where educators can innovate, where we can honor both tradition and transformation.
In 2016, the year I returned from abroad, I read Deborah Frieze’s writing and since, it has guided my work and this phrase, inspired by her work, continued to stay stamped in my brain: "we must hospice our dying systems as we birth new systems." This work requires us to be present in the discomfort of the in-between, to hold space for multiple truths. It requires a different kind of vulnerability - the courage to step into the liminal space between perspectives, to listen deeply to stories different from our own.
The path ahead requires us to hospice what's dying while midwifing what's being born, to look to the cycles of the past to know where we're going, to acknowledge our differences while recognizing our fundamental interconnection. This is the work of our time - to be bridge-builders in an age of division, to find meaning in the midst of transformation, to weave new stories that can hold us all.