🎧 Prefer to listen? The Orphan in Search of Belonging Through Work the audio version from the Figlet daily podcast.
I often joke that I work like an orphan in search of belonging. It’s funny, but it’s also true. My life’s work has been proof of work, turning aloneness into service.
You keep working to prove you deserve a place at the table.
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Ireland: The Small Island
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I grew up in “old” Ireland in the seventies and eighties, when the island was small, white, and convinced of its own innocence. I laughed along with the jokes everyone laughed at, but inside I felt the flinch. Even then I knew some of what passed for humor was cruelty in disguise. I was a child who could feel the shame before I could name it.
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There’s a story I remember vividly: the Irish cricket team playing the West Indies. A well-meaning official thanked the groundskeepers “for working like blacks.” He meant it as praise. The West Indies players heard it as an insult. Both were true. Ignorance does not preclude guilt, as Primo Levi wrote.
That early sensitivity shaped me, the orphan’s eye for what others ignore. It also pushed me to leave. Ireland was too small to see itself, and I wanted to breathe in a world that could. Ironically, the country I left has since opened into the diversity I once had to go elsewhere to find.
The Widening Gyre
I grew up again in progressive San Francisco, in the dance world, in therapy training, in a culture convinced of its moral purity. I was fully indoctrinated in the progressive movement. Later, through Bitcoin, I discovered a different story: that what we call capitalism was never truly capitalism at all, that money built on broken incentives distorts every system. Sound money, like sound love, requires proof of work.
But the discovery left me lonely. The progressive world I once called home feels punitive now, addicted to outrage. The right, in its own way, has gone mad. As Yeats wrote, “the centre cannot hold.” Holding the centre feels like standing in the middle of a poisoned well.
There’s an old parable I love. A king goes on pilgrimage, learns from the oracle that his kingdom’s well will soon be poisoned, and races home to warn his people. By the time he arrives, everyone has drunk the water and lost their minds. When he tries to tell them, they call him mad. The king must choose: drink the poison and belong, or stay sane and be alone. Most of us drink. Some stay silent. A few accept the loneliness of being called mad.
You keep working to prove you deserve a place at the table.
Do you know you can get personalized answers to all your questions from the same wisdom that wrote this article, right now?
Ask anything about your own situation and get an answer immediately. Keep asking, think it through, work out what to do next.
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“We are all born mad. Some remain so.” Samuel Beckett
The trick is to remain mad in the right way, to keep a conscience when the world rewards conformity.
The Untrustworthy Mind
I’m careful now with any new faith, even Bitcoin. I know how easily conviction becomes ideology. I remind myself what I remind my couples: you’re not trustworthy. You can’t see the full truth of the system you’re in. Neither can I. You keep working to prove you deserve a place at the table. Talk it through with Figlet.
So I rely on Eros not just romantic love, but the charged friendship that lets people tell you the truth because they love you enough to risk it. The healer without Eros becomes the mad king shouting into the wind.
There are four quadrants of knowing:
- What I know about myself and others know.
- What I know and no one else does.
- What others see and I cannot.
- And the gold of alchemy, what neither I nor anyone yet knows.
Only through love can we touch that last quadrant, the mystery that keeps us changing.
If any of this is landing close to home, you can talk it through right now with Figlet, Figs’ AI mini me, and get an answer about your own situation in seconds. Ask Figlet about working for belonging..
Belonging
Whether I’m working with couples or writing about culture, the work is the same: building proof-of-work love in a world that mistakes performance for truth.
To belong without drinking the poison.
To stay kind while everyone shouts.
To keep climbing the fur of the cosmic rabbit, as in Sophie’s World, daring to look out at the universe and see both madness and beauty at once.
Epigraphs and Echoes
“Ignorance does not preclude guilt.”, Primo Levi
“The centre cannot hold.”, W. B. Yeats
“We are all born mad. Some remain so.”, Samuel Becket
Figs is a licensed couples therapist, founder of Empathi.com, and co-creator with his wife, Teale. Together, they help people heal the ache beneath conflict and rediscover connection. Figs writes and speaks about love, shame, and the proof-of-work of being human.
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