As we trudge through our daily lives the mood of Australians seems to be gradually dropping. People feel angry, overwhelmed and helpless. War and climate change feel very present threats. And yet in Australia, comparatively – things are relatively good. This information doesn’t provide any comfort…
Our standard of living may have peaked and possibly it’s downhill from now on for the majority of us with the exception being the incredibly rich and getting richer minority. This is why studying history is so important. This angry discontent has happened time and time again when the very rich expect their poorer co-citizens to support them. When this happens it ignites an existential questioning about the meaning of life and the concept of fairness. Once again, as has happened many times before, it triggers some sort of global reckoning. Where it will take us no-one knows. What we do know is that this is not the first time a civilisation has faced an ending of its way of being.
Building on my last blog of finding ways to soothe I’ve decide in this blog I will do a recap on the work of Humberto Maturana. For those of you who have done family therapy training it’s a bit of revision for others hopefully it’s an introduction to a way of thinking that can help guide decision making and the best way to utilise ones emotional and financial resources.
Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana had a huge impact on my work. I was lucky enough to be able to see him in person when he did workshops in Australia in the 90s. His focus was on what it means to be human.
We are communal animals, we work best when we co-operate and love is our most fundamental emotion. When there’s an interference to love we’re in trouble. Like all mammals we give birth to live young but unlike other mammals our young can do nothing for themselves except cry. There’s no ability to grip fur or crawl blindly towards our mothers. Maturana hypothesised this indicated that we needed more loving attention than any other species. This love begins when and infant cries a caring adult responds. The adult does’t impose what it thinks is right for the infant for example: the right time, the right amount of cuddles etc. It responds to the infants’ cry if for what ever reason the infant can’t be soothed the adult manages their emotions as best they can but still attends to the infant; whether this is just walking with them or rocking them. The adult doesn’t interpret the distress of the infant as a form of manipulation they assume the distress is valid even if they can’t soothe the infant. Now this is great in theory and we all have our moments of frustrated rage with an impossible to soothe baby – Maturana would say if this is occasional it doesn’t matter but if it becomes part of the manner of living there is an interference to the biologically essential love.
We have lived under the influence of economic rationalism since the 1980s. Every thing is priced ‘time is money’ . Things that can’t be priced have no value. Which means the sort of love I’m talking about has no value. The idea that raising the next generation is a community responsibility, has more or less disappeared. Unproductive time is considered time wasted, even though often wasted time feeds innovation and creativity. Maturana talked about cultural change occurring when there is a change of cultural emotioning. I think we are witnessing this with people’s distress being activated into rage. The fuelling of hate as a solution that extreme right wing humans are generating, I find truly terrifying. It goes against what is existentially fundamental to our humanness.
Finding a target for the distress of a population is not new, but it takes our eye off the ball – so to speak. I see mounting evidence that our way of life is unsustainable in its current structure. When resources are scarce there is conflict. Essential resources like clean air, manageable temperatures, water, relatively predictable weather patterns are all becoming scare, topped off by escalating costs and natural disasters.
What is it like to be a parent of young children today, nothing is given, not even a future. Everything costs something. If you can’t afford what is now an essential item like a laptop for your primary aged children you have to go through the humiliation of applying for exemptions or funding to provide what is required by a cash strapped state education system. As a culture we seemed to have lost our generosity of spirit, things like laptops should be funded as part of essential equipment. This shift of our fundamental cultural emotioning has happened slowly over a long period of time. The shrinking of the middle class – what I would call the stabilising class, is a significant loss and with it the belief that the majority of Australians can afford to live a relatively comfortable life and if you couldn’t there was a reliable safety net. This created a trust that you could provide the essential basics for your dependent loved ones. Of course there were always exceptions particularly when excessive drugs or alcohol was involved.
As I write this a mother of a young child who has been crying for over an hour sits desperately at a library computer trying to do something that looks important. There is no occasional childcare available or even a librarian who might be able to offer a book or read a story to the distressed child. We’ve given all that away because of the cost. These opportunities for small loving acts that were enabled through government support are gone. Wealth has moved upwards to a small group of very large corporations and a larger group of older Australians who have been able to take advantage of generous tax brakes.
In the recent government attempt to address this imbalance and tax wealth in the same way as wages the bleating was pretty shameful. We are a storying animal and how the media stories this shift wasn’t as an act of love to struggling young families.
So back to the reflection on where we are at as a community. How do families feel hopeful and grapple with what their lives mean. Humans in the main have always hoped for a better future for their children, but what does better actually look like. Maybe this is where our comfort can lie as parents. Maybe a better future might not be in measured in financial terms but in terms of time to laugh, play, enjoy a picnic. All the things that can soothe despair, even when you can’t quite pay the bills.
Maybe future generations will look back on us with amazement that we were so obsessed with owning things we didn’t have time to enjoy anything and were trapped in a maze of disappointment – a definite underminer of mental health.
If we are loved enough, in terms of being recognised as a valid other, we can play, think and create. We are much more adaptive. A lovely study done in Australia tracked 1,400 Australian children and unsurprisingly discovered that: “Toddlers who excel at pretend play are significantly less likely to experience emotional and behavioural difficulties by the time they reach primary school.” (Neuroscience News.com April 22, 2026. Emily Fraser – University of Sydney) It’s in childhood play the emotional resources are developed to manage whatever is ahead of us.
Playing is not wasting time. It’s in our creativity that a pathway to the future will be found, How we story current financial and emotional distress is important. Are we seeding fear, disappointment, blame and hate in our children that will rob them of their creativity and playfulness.
Our future and our current way of life is under threat, what we do with our despair is important. How do we support trust and find ways to embed in ourselves and our young that we have the resources to find ways to build satisfying lives. Even if it doesn’t actualise it helps us continue with our day to day lives with a lighter emotioning – which in the end is what counts.
None of us know what the future holds.
Most of us are yearning for a simpler, less pressured life which coincidently will be cheaper. Nonetheless it’s also important not to be naive and take time to weep for humanity and the mess we seemed to have gotten ourselves into….
Open Access: “Longitudinal Evidence of the Relationship Between Pretend Play and Mental Health in the Early Years” by Fontini Vasilopoulos, Lucinda Grummitt, Sasha Bailey, Louise Birrell, Iroise Bumontheil, Fill Francis, Eliza Oliver, Oliva Karaolis, Robyn Ewing, Michael Anderson, Maree Teesson & Emma L. Barrett. Early Childhood Journal (DOI:10.1007/s10643-026-02150-7.