There’s a question I keep coming back to, and I want to offer it to you: What are you actually running on?
Not as a spiritual question. As a practical one.
In my years as a counselor and coach, I watched people hold up under extraordinary pressure. And I watched people collapse under pressure that, from the outside, didn’t look nearly as heavy. The difference was rarely ability. It was almost always fuel: the source of meaning keeping them going.
Viktor Frankl, who survived three years in Nazi concentration camps, wrote that “those who have a ‘why’ to live can bear almost any ‘how.’” He wasn’t writing about comfortable people in stable times. He was writing about people who had every reason to give up.
But not all whys are equal.
In Staying Strong in Unsteady Times, I draw a distinction I keep returning to: sustainable versus depleting sources of meaning. It sounds simple. It isn’t.
Rage feels like a why. Outrage feels like fuel. And for a while, it is. The problem is that it’s sprint fuel in a marathon. I’ve watched people burn bright for months, furious and activated, posting every day, fighting every fight, and then one morning they couldn’t get out of bed. Not because the situation improved. Because they’d burned through everything they had.
Revenge is the same way. So is bitterness. So is the daily score-keeping of who’s winning and who’s losing.
What actually sustains people over time looks different. It looks like love, for a person, a community, a place. It looks like legacy, doing something you believe matters beyond your own lifetime. It looks like contribution, even small contribution, to something bigger than your own anger. It looks like justice understood as a long project, not a daily verdict.
Rosa, a woman I write about in the book, has been an activist for fifty years. She marched for civil rights in the sixties, organized against Vietnam, fought for women’s equality, resisted Reagan, pushed for LGBTQ+ rights. When a younger organizer told her she was burned out and didn’t understand how Rosa was still going, Rosa said: “I stopped expecting to win in my lifetime. I’m part of a relay race, not a sprint.”
That is sustainable.
Here is a simple audit worth sitting with. Think about what is driving you through these unsteady times. Is it anger at a specific person? The need to prove something? Or is it something that connects you to people you love, work you believe in, a future you are trying to help build?
Both get you through today. Only one gets you through the years ahead.
If you find yourself running on fumes, it might not mean you need more willpower. It might mean you need better fuel.
Staying Strong in Unsteady Times explores this and much more, practical frameworks for building resilience when the stress is not temporary and the finish line is not visible.