Unrealized Loss
Economists have a term for the loss incurred when an investment has decreased in value but hasn’t yet been sold: it’s an “unrealized loss.” It’s only when the investor sells the stock that the loss becomes real and the money is gone. In our society right now, we’re experiencing a different kind of unrealized loss—not of money, but of sacred relationships with our bodies, with one another, and with the earth. I call these sacred relationships because in my experience it is through these relationships in the material world that we encounter the divine. And our alienation from them brings grief and even despair.
These three types of loss – of body, community, and earth – are at the heart of my writing these days, including my forthcoming book, The Secret Despair of the Secular Left. I write about this loss because I have experienced it myself, and seen it in my world. And the work of addressing this loss is the heart of my own spiritual practice, drawing from Jewish and other ancient, earth-based traditions. It is core to my teaching, my parenting, and my one-on-one spiritual work with others. So I wanted to share here, in one of my first Substack essays, how I understand our unrealized loss and where it comes from. I believe that it’s crucial to give voice to our grief as part of the pathway to a deeper, more joyfully rooted life.
In the modern era, our society has made a panoply of cultural investments. We’ve invested in technology, global mobility, convenience, pleasure, and an ethic of rights-based individualism and personal actualization. On the surface, these investments have paid great dividends. But they’ve been expensive. They have come at the cost of other investments we could make—in religious life, family, local community, ethnic and cultural traditions, serious spiritual practice, and increasingly our capacity for being physically present with others. Most disastrously, we have failed to invest in the land and all the creatures with whom our fate is enmeshed.
Like an overvalued stock, our investments can cruise along happily until there is a crisis. But when we’re forced to sell -- when we have to use the resources into which we’ve sunk our life energy-- then we learn their true value. This is the moment at which we find ourselves today. Our investments are failing us. The early twenty-first century is widely recognized as an era of social disintegration. And we are witnessing the storms, droughts, and fires that signal the real-time unravelling of the ecosystems of our planet.
In our panic we look to our now-familiar saviours—the experts of science and economics and the sages of self-improvement. But we find ourselves still foundering. When it comes to the big questions of life and death, meaning, purpose, God, or love, the experts run out of words. AI can tell us the statistical probability of masks preventing COVID-19 transmission, but it cannot say how the freedom of individuals should balance against the interests of public health. A TED talk might tell us how to make ourselves 10 percent happier, but it cannot weigh the value of happiness itself as a goal. A website can list a hundred burial and cremation options, but it cannot hold us and teach us what to do with our own loved one’s body when they die. These are matters of wisdom carried in communities of faith, cultural traditions, and divine revelation. And these are the investments that we find lacking when we really need them, like today, when we are in crisis and we are forced to sell.
Raised “Nothing”
I grew up in a secular Jewish family. So secular that I didn’t even know we were Jewish. We celebrated Christmas and Easter as American holidays, but my parents were atheists. Religion and heritage, like anything else, were merely options, and we had opted out. We had invested fully in secular modernity. In my understanding, as a white, upper-middle-class, geographically mobile, vaguely culturally Christian family, we were simply “nothing”—devoid of any limiting particularities. This itself constituted the American dream for us. We were free to be exactly who we wanted to be at all times. In the words of the classic feminist album that was on loop in my childhood home, we were “free to be you and me.” I enjoyed this privilege for a time. But eventually I found that at the heart of this “nothingness” was a profound emptiness. I had social privilege but spiritual poverty.
I have come to believe that this is not just my story, but the defining story of our time. It’s the story of disembodiment, disconnection, and dislocation. We have lost our roots in so many ways, and what remains to us turns out to be inadequate to the challenges of our time. Our stock price has bottomed out just when we most need liquidity.
I eventually found my way back to Jewish practices, and through my explorations I began to awaken to an alternative way of understanding our place in the world. In contrast to the freedom of “nothing,” ancient religious traditions offer the fullness of “something.” These traditions celebrate materiality – a physical world that is a gift and manifestation of the divine. This materiality is quite different from the wifty, ethereal spirituality we often associate with religious traditions, and also quite different from the empty materialism of so much of secular life. It is an enchanted materiality—one in which the whole world vibrates like a gong struck with meaning and purpose.
Nefesh, Am, and Adamah
In my reading of Jewish texts as well as my own spiritual journeys, I’ve found that three concentric dimensions of this vibrating materiality emerge again and again: in Hebrew transliteration, they are nefesh, am (rhymes with “mom”), and adamah, and they roughly correspond with body, community, and land. Nefesh is the soul–body composite that is our human self. It is the whole of our being as physical manifestations of the divine. Am, in its simplest meaning, is a people. It’s an extended family, or a joinable tribal group with a shared history and culture. Adamah means earth, soil, or land—the substance of the living planet herself, from which we are made and to which we return. These sacred structures—nefesh, am, and adamah— are our access points to the sacred miracle of this reality we live in.
It is with these dimensions of life that we are losing connection in secular modernity. First, the loss of the ability to fully inhabit our own nefesh: we’ve become alienated from our physical, animal nature. We shape and use our bodies as vehicles for our personal aspirations. We overmedicate and over-beautify. We rage against all bodily limitations, as we rage against the limits of the earth. We fight against the signs of aging and consider death a defeat to be avoided at all costs. We cede our bodies’ innate childbirth wisdom to experts. Today’s account of gender unmoors our selfhood from our sexed bodies. And we ignore bodies altogether as we exist increasingly in virtual spaces.
Second, loss of the am—relationship with one another: In our increasingly virtual and polarized social media world, we are losing our appetite for connecting face-to-face with other human beings. We are increasingly living alone, working from home, dating less, marrying less, and having less sex and fewer children. As the fabric of our social world frays and our social confidence declines, we compensate by commodifying our relationships. We outsource to professional services as intimate as visiting grandparents or setting up a romantic scene for a marriage proposal, complete with rose petals and champagne. We do not know who “our people” are, and in-person community is becoming harder and harder to find.
Third, loss of relationship with adamah, the earth: We are not “from” anywhere—we have no connection to land or any particular spot on earth. We do not know where our food comes from or whence water flows to our tap. We estrange our sibling creatures for use as “resources.” We engage in mindless consumption and try to shield our eyes from the sight of the cruelty and desecration perpetrated in our name. As mammals, we can sense the dissolving of the natural world around us and the impending danger, but we don’t know how to place the feeling of foreboding and sadness. It seems like strawberries get less flavorful every year, but we can’t remember what they used to taste like.
There is no “bad guy” here. There is no single individual or even institutional culprit. Every one of us participates daily in the practices that keep the whole system aloft. We are the ones who reproduce it and sustain it. It is all of our work to reweave ourselves and each other into the enchanted materiality of life. Recognizing and naming our unrealized losses is a vital first step. We need an outlet for the cry of our souls, whether it’s in religious community, alone in the woods, or with a trusted guide. Then, it’s about reinvestment. The good news is, there is an awesome power of regeneration that’s available when we start to reinvest in the things that matter most. I pray that even as I work with this reinvestment in my own heart, I can be of support to others in returning to real life, regrounding in the gifts of nefesh, am, and adamah. It’s spiritual and cultural work, it belongs to all of us, and I believe it’s foundational to the large-scale transformation we crave.