The last of the three Chinese proverbs related to living in “interesting times” is May you find what you are looking for. Given the dual meaning of these proverbs, perhaps the ancient philosopher was suggesting that we don’t really want the things we think we want or are looking for. On the other hand, he could have been suggesting that in times of crisis we have the greatest opportunities to actually bring about the changes we need to find what we are looking for. Both seem to apply to the “interesting times” we are living in today.

For example, most people today probably think they would be happier if they were wealthier, so that’s what they are looking for. For some, this might be true, but for most of us, it’s probably not. We know now that greater wealth doesn’t necessarily bring greater happiness – sometimes, it brings just the opposite. On the other hand, there has never been a time of greater opportunity for the people of America. However, to realize this opportunity we must be willing to work, individually and collectively, to reclaim the American democracy and create a new sustainable American economy and society. In doing so, we will find what we actually are looking for; we will find happiness.

Prosperity without growth. Government cannot ensure the happiness of people, but government can help create an ecological, social, and economic environment in which all people have an equal opportunity to pursue happiness. First, we must recognize that ensuring the opportunity to accumulate wealth is not the same as ensuring the opportunity to pursue happiness. Centuries of human experience has been confirmed by reams of recent research: Greater wealth does not necessarily bring greater happiness.

Prosperity has been suggested as a sustainable alternative to wealth as an objective of public policy. The word prosperity is derived from the Latin word for “doing well,” which suggests something more than wealth. A distinguished group of scholars brought together by the Sustainable Development Commission of the United Kingdom concluded, “The requirements of prosperity go way beyond material sustenance. Prosperity has vital social and psychological dimensions. To do well is in part about the ability to give and receive love, to enjoy the respect of your peers, to contribute useful work, and to have a sense of belonging and trust in the community.”[1]

In Buddhist philosophy, prosperity is closely associated with collectivism and spirituality. It is sometimes defined as a state of flourishing or thriving. These same words are used to describe Aristotle’s concept of happiness, which most certainly had social and moral dimensions. Prosperity includes wealth, but it also includes social and ethical well-being. The U.K. commission distinguished between wealth and happiness by defining happiness as a passing feeling of joy or elation. However, true happiness comes from a sense of contentment at the core of our being, which is not passing but an ongoing aspect of life in good times and bad. Consequently, the pursuit of prosperity is closely linked with the quest for sustainability and the pursuit of true happiness.

The road to sustainable prosperity will be clear once the constitutional provisions are in place to ensure the ecological, social, and economic rights of people. Corporations will no longer have the power to influence the political process and thus will no longer be able to extract and exploit without due consideration of the ecological and social impacts of their actions. People will be protected from persuasive and deceptive advertising and marketing schemes as well as outright economic fraud. The right of everyone to live in a clean and healthy environment will be a priority of government rather than an afterthought. Furthermore, those of future generations will be afforded the same rights as those of present generations, which will protect their opportunities to pursue prosperity in the future. Perhaps the pursuit of prosperity will be more acceptable as a goal for government policy than will ensuring sustainability. Regardless, the pursuit of either is virtually synonymous with the pursuit of true happiness.

Prosperity requires some amount of individual wealth but does not necessarily require continual economic growth. Government programs that promote prosperity require money, some of which must come from taxes on the income and wealth of taxpayers. However, growth in tax revenues need not grow any faster than growth in incomes, individual incomes need not grow any faster than the growth in population, and, over time, the population need not grow at all.

Growth in the human population is inevitably linked in one way or another to a sense of insecurity. People have a natural tendency to reproduce. However, they over-reproduce only when the only trusting and caring relationships they can depend on are with their children, or when they feel a need to rely on one or more of their children to take care of them in their old age. Both of these insecurities can be addressed through more trusting and caring relationships among people within communities and societies.

The mistaken belief that prosperity requires growth also is rooted in the fact that human happiness depends on having some sense of progress or achievement in life. Progress in developing stronger personal relationships and a greater sense of purpose and meaning in life is not dependent on economic growth. In fact, policies that promote economic growth are far more likely to compromise than to enhance the ability of individuals to grow socially and spiritually. Furthermore, if there is an absolute limit to the extent to which we can improve human relationships and human ethics in general, it is so far beyond the current human condition as to be of no practical consequence. Thus, continuing progress and achievement in human happiness do not depend on continuing economic growth.

In addition, there is always an opportunity for progress and achievement in our individual lives. Beyond some very modest level, the sense of economic success becomes relative: It is how much money people make or have relative to other people that matters, not the absolute amount. In addition, there will always be opportunities for individuals to acquire more wealth, even if the economy in general does not generate more wealth. The economy is inherently dynamic; fortunes will always be being made and lost by individuals. The lack of economic growth in general does little, if anything, to diminish the opportunities for individual economic success.

The opportunity for meaningful employment is a basic human right and thus a public responsibility. Fortunately, the need to increase employment to accommodate sustainable increases in population does not present an insurmountable problem. One logical strategy during times of cyclical unemployment is to create opportunities for each worker to work fewer hours – to share the available work. This would leave more time for building relationships and for contemplating life’s deeper ethical and moral values. When the economy inevitably slumps, rather than having 10 percent unemployment, everyone could go home from work at noon on Friday. This would create enough jobs for everyone, by each worker working 10 percent less time. It wouldn’t be quite that simple in practice, but the basic idea is to reduce employment for more people so fewer people will be completely out of work. Some companies and some nations are already experimenting with this approach in coping with the current recession.

In the longer term, government policies could be redirected to promote technologies that create more jobs per $1,000 in GDP (gross domestic product), rather than attempting to generate a larger GDP with fewer workers. Today’s public policies are a throwback to an earlier era when resources seemed unlimited, the workers were few, and material needs were many. The objective was to increase total production by increasing productivity per worker so that each worker would be able to earn more and spend more to promote even greater economic growth.

Today, we know that resources are limited, and the workers are many. Furthermore, material well-being is no longer the limiting factor in overall well-being for many people of the world. Today, we need to create more jobs from less throughput of material and energy. This does not mean returning to labor-intensive production. It does mean producing things that rely more on the uniquely human capacities for complex thinking – creativity, imagination, insight, and intuition. It means producing fewer things that rely on sophisticated mechanisms that employ “nonthinking” people in fewer numbers to mass-produce more stuff. The industrial era is over. It’s time for fundamental change in public policy.

The steady state economy. Ecological economists contend that long-run economic sustainability is possible only with a “steady state economy.” A steady state economy requires a constant or steady rate of throughput, meaning a constant flow of energy and materials used to produce goods and services. The sustainable level of throughput is defined by the quantity of useful energy available for inflow and the ability of nature to absorb and detoxify the outflow of wasted energy. A steady state economy is typically characterized as an economy that maintains a constant population, meaning a constant supply of labor, and constant stocks of capital, which includes personal wealth. In a steady state economy, there is no growth in total GDP or aggregate personal wealth. Most proponents of a steady state economy understand that a lack of growth in aggregate economic output is of little practical consequence in sustaining prosperity or in the pursuit of happiness.

The sustainable level of economic income and wealth on earth is ultimately limited by the quantity of economic value that can be extracted from the daily inflow of solar energy. All of the molecules of matter on earth can be recycled or reused over and over again to capture and store solar energy and produce things of economic value. Solar energy can be used to offset the loss of usefulness each time the physical elements that are bound by energy are released to make the energy available for us. However, all of the energy on earth at any given time eventually will be lost through heat that is released back into the rest of the universe through the process of entropy. This lost energy must be replenished with solar energy.

Over any period of time, a sustainable economy requires only that the quantity of new solar energy used to create economic value be equal to or greater than the quantity of useful energy wasted or lost to entropy. Over time, the economic usefulness of a given amount of energy can be increased by reducing energy waste and thereby increasing the efficiency of energy use. This is commonly referred to as “de-linking” production from the use of natural resources. However, there are theoretical limits to efficiency in energy use and, thus, limits to the level of economic activity that can be sustained on earth over time. The law of entropy cannot be repealed by economic idealism.

That said, the earth and life on earth are never in a steady state, at least not unless the earth ultimately degrades to an absolute state of entropy. This would mean no remaining useful energy, no economy, no life, nothing but a dead, inert mass. As long as there is life on earth, there will always be cycles of light and darkness, birth and death, growth and decay. Human knowledge of the universe, the earth, humanity, society, and economics will always be changing and evolving. There will always be opportunities for progress and greater achievement for any individual within any society, and any society within humanity, as long as solar energy continues to fall upon the earth, unless … we allow the earth to continue to degenerate toward a state of entropy.

These are not radical or even new ideas. Classical economist John Stuart Mills suggested that economic growth needed to continue only until everyone enjoyed some “reasonable standard of living.” After that, he suggested, the economy could remain at some “stationary state” that would continue to meet the basic needs of people. Adam Smith recognized that the economy might eventually exhaust its natural and human resources and reach some maximum sustainable level of output. Neoclassical economist John Maynard Keynes wrote about a time when the “economic problem” would be solved: People would have all of the material things they needed and could then devote their time and energy to more rewarding noneconomic activities. Keynes was right. The economic problem has been solved. The time has come to turn our attention to the “permanent problem,” in the words of Keynes, which is to live wisely, agreeably, and well. The permanent problem is to learn to live in harmony with nature and society, to focus our time and energy on the social and ethical dimensions of happiness, as we continue to meet our basic economic needs.

A multitude of intelligent, thoughtful, experienced people are working on concepts, plans, and strategies for achieving ecological, social, and economic sustainability. For example, the Sustainable Development Commission of the United Kingdom has proposed a specific set of public policies to promote broad-based prosperity instead of individual wealth. Their proposals include policies for investing public dollars in “green” jobs and infrastructure, increasing restraints on and regulation of the financial economy, improving macro-accounting to include depletion of ecological and social resources, promoting work sharing and other measures to improve the work-life balance, addressing gross inequities in income and wealth, measuring policy outcomes in terms of overall societal well-being, promoting local economies and community-based sustainability, dismantling current incentives for materialistic consumption, respecting the inherent ecological and social limits to economic growth, and promoting global sharing of sustainable technologies.

However, a true revolution is an organic process: It is conceived and then born; then it must be nurtured and given time to grow. Only when the revolution has reached maturity will the most promising strategies, policy agendas, and courses of action become clear. The change we need must arise as an organic process, not from the government, but from the governed – from the common, ordinary, thoughtful people of the Middle.

New communications technologies make possible far greater participation in government than has ever been possible before in the history of America. Digital publishing has opened wider opportunities to participate in the processes of democracy by allowing previously unknown writers to put forth their strategies for the best way forward. The Internet allows ordinary people to engage in the conversations around alternative proposals that will ultimately reveal the most promising ways to proceed with the revolution. The call for a national dialogue centered on constitutional revision is but one possible means of focusing public attention on the core issues that eventually must be addressed to restore consent, reclaim democracy, and return to prosperity.

All of the various roadmaps, strategies, and agendas will be to no avail unless and until the people of the Middle find the courage to rise up in revolution. It will always be possible to find fault with any specific proposal put forth for consideration. Ultimately, people will simply have to find the courage to pursue the strategies and agendas that make sense to them, and trust that if they do their part, if they do what they feel they need to, others will do the same, and together we will do the things that ultimately must be done. Each of us has a unique purpose in life, at this particular time in our life. We have an opportunity “to find what we have been looking for.” We need only find the courage to do what we know in our heart we should do and trust that, having done our part, we will have done enough. Let the Revolution of the Middle begin!

Having done all … let go; be happy. In the words of Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher, “Everything flows and nothing stands still. The harmonious structures of the world depend upon opposite tensions, like the bow and the lyre.”[2] Action inevitably creates stress, but few people would choose a life without action, and revolutions certainly don’t happen without action. Just as we exercise our bodies to gain strength and endurance, we can strengthen our entire being as we deal with inevitable conflicts among the physical, mental, and spiritual demands of life.

We each have a limited amount of time and energy that we must allocate among the competing needs and wants of our life. This competition inevitably creates stress. Such stress is neither good nor bad; it’s just a fact of life. As in physical exercise, we can learn to use stress to make us stronger and more durable, but only if we don’t allow stress to become distress. Like a dancer performing the challenging movements of a dance, we must find ways to maintain a dynamic balance as we cope with life’s crises and seize life’s opportunities. If we pull a mental muscle or break a spiritual bone, we may find ourselves on the sidelines, unable to participate in the dance of life. As in dancing, the potentials embodied in life’s challenges and opportunities make our lives worth living. But we must be willing to gain the strength and endurance needed to survive the challenges if we are to reap the rewards of the opportunities.

From time to time in the midst of the revolution it will be necessary to relax and let go, to trust that the revolution will continue without our pushing and fighting for a while. There will be times when we must simply let go … and let life happen.

Sometimes the tides of nature and the winds of social change will carry us along life’s journey for a while without any purposeful decisions on our part. At other times, the momentum of life’s rhythms and energies will seem to propel us without intention or efforts. At such times, we need to learn to just let go. At other times, we will get tired and will lose our way. At these times, we need to stop and rest, reflect, pray, meditate, or simply do nothing, until we regain our strength and our bearings. At all such times, we must be willing to stop trying to direct or control our lives and the lives of others around us. We must simply let go and go with life’s flow.

When we have done all we can do, we need to understand that what happens next is not up to us. Our experiences of life are all interconnected with all of the other emerging social and ecological potentials of the whole of reality emerging around us. No matter how strong, intelligent, or spiritual we may think we are, we are not in control. The only control we have over our life experiences is our reactions to our perceptions of the unfolding reality around us. We can certainly affect nature and society, but we have no control over them; we are all co-evolving through our shared experiences. Our only means of influence or control are our contributions to this co-evolution, and, at times, we need to defer to nature and society and simply go with the flow.

At other times, we will need to admit that we don’t know what to do. We can never be sure that our perceptions of truth are not false or that our perceptions of right are not wrong. Truth exists only in the web of life that transcends human comprehension. Our intelligent insights, informed intuition, and intentional instincts are certainly of value, but they are not pure knowledge. To walk our path of purpose, we need to temper our intellect and ego with wisdom and humility. Paraphrasing the wisdom of the Tao Te Ching, “When we think that we know the answers, we are difficult to guide. When we know that we don’t know, we can find our own way.”[3] If we are certain we know for sure what we are meant to be and do, we may never find our way, but if we admit that we don’t know, our purpose may appear before us bright as day. To realize our highest potentials in life, we must live with humility. At times, we must be willing to let go and admit what we don’t know.

Although we can never be certain of our purpose, happiness is our best indicator. Happiness does not mean continual exhilaration or joy; real happiness is a sense of peace and contentment at the core of our being. The Christian Apostle Paul wrote in the New Testament, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds.”[4] This verse doesn’t promise that God will give us whatever we request in our prayers; it promises that if we trust in God, we will find a sense of peace that transcends all understanding. We will feel contentment in our heart and soul. We will have found happiness.

In reality, happiness is not something we can pursue or achieve; happiness is a natural consequence of our doing what we are here on earth to do and becoming what we were meant to be. If we actually pursue happiness, we will become distracted from our true purpose in life, and we will find only frustration and sorrow. If we try to achieve happiness, we will never have enough of whatever we think we need to be happy. We will spend our lives pursuing something less than our highest potentials and will never find peace and contentment at the core of our being. Life is not without frustration, disappointments, and sorrow. But even during such times, if we remain true to our purpose, we will have a sense of contentment, peace, and serenity at the core of our being.

If we have fallen victim to disabling birth defects, diseases, or accidents, it may be difficult to understand why we seemingly have been singled out for such challenges in life. Our natural inclination is to go through the normal stages of loss – denial, anger, depression, and then ultimate acceptance. All too often, we are then willing to settle for something less than our full measure of happiness. However, what we first see as physical and mental obstacles or challenges may instead turn out to be landmarks that guide us toward our real purpose in life. Perhaps we are meant to influence people that we would never have met if we were not seen as physically or mentally challenged. Alternatively, maybe our accident or illness was a clear and undeniable signal that we were on the wrong path and needed to reassess our highest potentials.

The death of a child is perhaps the most difficult of all life’s challenges to accept. We naturally feel that such a child has been cheated out of a full and happy life. But the value of a life cannot be assessed by its length. Some of our lives apparently are meant to be long and others short. Perhaps the child’s life was cut short needlessly by the misdeeds or misdirection of another. On the other hand, the child may have completed its purpose on earth, or maybe its death was its primary purpose. The death of a child can have a powerful influence on others.

We are all integral parts of the same interdependent whole. The same molecules, energy, and spirit permeate all of us. We are all equally essential to the well-being of the greater whole and thus of equal inherent worth, no matter how long or short our lives may be. Even in death, we can find contentment, peace, and serenity in knowing that each life has purpose and meaning.

Perhaps we should be more concerned if we were born into conditions of wealth and influence than if we were born into poverty. From those to whom much has been given, much may be expected in return. Perhaps being handsome, intelligent, and rich is more of a curse than a blessing, in that we may be more likely to be led astray than the so-called less fortunate. Regardless of whether we feel blessed or cursed by the vagaries of life, we can never have pure knowledge of the purpose of our lives.

We do know we have a purpose in life, and we know that our life was meant to be good. We know also that we were not given a purpose that we will not be able to pursue, and we know no one’s purpose in life is any more important than the purpose of anyone else. In the best and worst of circumstances, we can find peace and serenity, if we are willing to acknowledge what we know and don’t know, and then let go.

Even if we have a clear sense of purpose, we should always be prepared to reassess our lives as we move through our life experiences of reality. If we feel our purpose is to be a teacher, preacher, or politician, we should nonetheless be willing to consider other ways of being of service to the public. If we feel we are meant to be a painter, writer, or entertainer, we should be willing to consider other forms of abstract expression. And if we feel we are meant to be an employer, worker, or entrepreneur, we should be open to a wide range of occupations that contribute to the material well-being of humanity. As we go through life, we may have to change course several times, particularly as we grow older, to realize our highest potentials and thus remain true to our purpose.

In the Revolution of the Middle every role will be important. The revolution will need political leaders, advisors, organizers, canvassers, and staffers who stuff envelopes and make phone calls. It will need community leaders, organizers, activists, and millions of supportive community members. There will be roles for radicals who commit acts of civil disobedience, moderates who march in public demonstrations, and pacifists who protest in silence. Regardless of our individual part in the revolution, confronting powerful economic and political interests will be sometimes dangerous and always stressful. To cope with the inherent risks and stresses we will need to rely on a sense of peace and contentment in the core of our being; we need to be happy.

The national discussion needed to reach a consensus on constitutional reform might even degenerate into political chaos. If it does, we must find the courage to express the inherent rights of the people to abolish their government and, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, “to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” It will take courage to start the new Revolution of the Middle and to carry it through to victory.

We can find that courage by reaffirming our belief that our life has a purpose. Thus, we must reaffirm our faith, for without faith, life has no purpose and no meaning. We must reaffirm our belief in the inherent goodness of life, for without love, life is not worth living. And, finally, we must reaffirm our hope; for without hope, there is no possibility of experiencing life’s goodness. We must reaffirm that in faith and in love, there is always hope.

As in the ancient proverb, we must know in our heart that it is possible to “find what we are looking for.” No matter how many times we may falter along the way, we simply cannot allow our lives to be lived pointlessly, emptily, without purpose, without meaning, without faith, without love, and, finally, without hope. Regardless of whether the Revolution of the Middle ultimately succeeds, we should never give up hope in the pursuit of our full measure of happiness.