Thriving in a Conflicted World: A Buddhist Perspective

The world is not getting simpler. If you're paying attention — and I think you should be paying attention — it's easy to feel overwhelmed. The scale of the problems. The pace of change. The difficulty of knowing what to do, or whether anything you do matters.

I've been practicing Buddhism for fifty years, which means I've been asking these questions for fifty years. I don't have final answers. But I have some things that have helped.

The first temptation, when the world feels overwhelming, is to disengage. To stop watching the news, stop following politics, stop caring about things you can't control. To retreat into your personal life and let the larger world take care of itself.

I understand that impulse. I've felt it. But I don't think it's the right response — not for me, and not, I'd argue, for anyone who takes seriously the idea that their actions have consequences.

Buddhism teaches that everything is interconnected. The suffering of people I'll never meet is not separate from my life. The state of the world is not separate from the state of my own heart. Disengagement is an illusion — you're still connected, you've just stopped paying attention to the connection.

I want to be careful about the word "thriving," because it can sound like I'm claiming that Buddhist practice makes you immune to difficulty. It doesn't.

What I mean by thriving is something more specific: the capacity to remain engaged, effective, and fundamentally hopeful even in the face of circumstances that argue against hope. Not naive optimism — the kind that pretends problems aren't real. But what I'd call earned hope: the kind that comes from having been through hard things and discovered that you can survive them, and sometimes transform them.

That's not a passive state. It's an active one. It requires daily maintenance.

One of the central teachings of Nichiren Buddhism is that inner transformation and outer transformation are inseparable. You can't change the world without changing yourself, and changing yourself inevitably changes the world — even in small ways that you can't always see.

This is not an excuse for inaction. It's not a way of saying: just work on yourself and everything will be fine. It's a way of saying: the work you do on yourself is not separate from the work you do in the world. They're the same work.

When I become more patient, I'm less likely to escalate conflict in my immediate environment. When I become more honest, I'm less likely to contribute to the culture of evasion and pretense that makes collective problem-solving so difficult. When I become more compassionate, I'm more likely to act in ways that actually help people rather than just making me feel like I'm helping.

These are small things. But small things, done consistently, over time, by enough people, add up to something.

Like gratitude, hope is not just a feeling. It's a practice. It's something you choose, repeatedly, in the face of evidence that might argue against it.

Daisaku Ikeda spent his life making the case for hope — not as wishful thinking, but as a form of courage. The courage to believe that human beings are capable of better than they're currently doing. The courage to keep working toward that better, even when progress is slow and setbacks are real. He passed away in November 2023, but that body of work — and that example — endures.

I find that inspiring. Not because I'm naive about the difficulty of the work, but because I've seen what happens when people actually commit to it. Things change. Not as fast as you'd like, and not always in the ways you expected. But they change.

I'm not going to give you a list of political actions or social causes, because that's not my lane. But I will say this: the most important thing you can do, in a conflicted world, is become the kind of person who makes things better rather than worse in your immediate sphere.

Be honest. Be kind. Be willing to be wrong. Show up for the people in your life. Take your practice seriously — whatever your practice is.

And keep going. That's the main thing. Keep going.

The world needs people who haven't given up. After fifty years, I'm still one of them. I hope you are too.

This post concludes a ten-part series drawn from themes in my book Fifty Years of Buddhist Practice, available to read free as a flipbook. No sign-up required. Read all posts in the series →