Protect your peace. This dogmatic turn of phrase, which was once charming, maybe even insightful, has become the “toxic force” it aims to expel. I can’t help but feel agitated each time it is spoken as a solution to an interpersonal issue. This phrase has embedded itself in the collective psyche of young people; it clouds our minds rather than resolving the tension of relationships. And I am guilty of this, so guilty in fact that I’ve been radicalized against the expression because I feel it betrays a concerning cultural trend towards isolationism and individualism.
In a quick search for the definition of “protecting your peace”, images of serene, glowing women rise to meet you. This woman is alone, preserved in a moment of clickbait spirituality. She is Julia Roberts in “Eat, Pray, Love”. The first article that popped up was written three years ago for Feel & Thrive when it was a new idea, before it became a pervasive attitude.
The author, Kathryn Gail, defines protecting your peace as “creating a healthy environment for your spiritual wellbeing by guarding yourself against negative influences that drain your energy and drag you down.” Doesn’t that sound like a good idea? When she says it is “essential to physical and mental well-being”, isn’t she right? We should take care of ourselves. Social media bombards us with an artillery of stimuli, and influencer gurus advise that we can best survive by standing on our own.
The trouble here is the utter lack of nuance this individualistic perspective has. This internet therapy can then be so easily misapplied, especially considering that it is not a philosophy intended for people who are truly struggling with their mental health. It’s intended as a guide for everyday life. As it is repeated on the internet and among people, protecting your peace is framed as a way to bear the crushing weight of the mundane.
You vent about how it all overwhelms and consumes, and then reject the stress, thus protecting your peace. You build impenetrable walls against feeling and empathy, against creative solutions to the condition of living. Spiritual words such as “energy”, paths, or alignment seem to bolster the ethos of protecting your peace by adding a mysticism to it, as if the action of cutting someone off is an essential thread in fate’s machinations. Friendships and relationships are now frequently ended at the first sign of true conflict.
One example of this I’ve seen is an Instagram reel from a creator named “elllie.barker” in which she says, “When I protect my peace too much and now I barely snap anyone, spend nights in, and have two friends.” This is the inadvertent consequence, and a message that has become prevalent as this self-protective attitude has become more pervasive.
Loneliness and social isolation in this decade are something that has touched everyone, especially in the wake of the pandemic. Ireland has the highest prevalence of loneliness out of every European country, according to the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. And I am absolutely not saying that protecting your peace is a cause of this trend, but rather that the disease is extreme individualism, and that protecting your peace is only a symptom which perpetuates the issue.
We are always trying to answer how to exist within a community, how to exist on this planet. I am not the first to say it, but conflict is the price of community. Taking care of yourself is so important, yet so is nourishing connections with others and the world. Discernment is then the most necessary for navigating life’s demands. Truly look at the situation, give those mundane stressors patience and grace before making any rash decisions. It’s that macro-level binary thinking that has seeped into our micro-level interactions with one another which we must not give in to.
I sound accusatory, I know, but it terrifies me the way we perpetuate our condition of loneliness by refusing to engage in the processes of community; truly listening to one another, letting the storm pass and picking up the pieces together, choosing mutual solutions rather than banishing the Other. I, too, am being vague, but that’s because this isn’t about how to exist in a community, but rather a call to invest in life instead of banishing it for the sake of temporary ease.
The last thing Gail says is advice on how to protect your peace: “learning to say no to people and situations that take too much, curating the content you consume online, and avoiding toxic people.”
Curating the content you consume online. That bald-faced statement, which is deeply characteristic of protecting your peace, struck me when I read it. She is an American writer, and protecting your peace is an even more popular notion in America than it is in Ireland. In that suggestion is an encouragement to strengthen the walls of your echo chamber, permission to soundproof the walls to uncomfortable realities. The irony is laughable as fascism has reared its ugly head and is devouring a nation that has long claimed to be the blazing emblem of democracy and freedom.
Protecting your peace is then a catchy reflection of a broader political attitude that sharply divides us, and which gives us permission to be blindly complacent in a world that desperately needs our focus. It is not just interpersonal relationships that suffer from our lazy individualism, but our societies, our nations, our planet.
Peace itself is an elusive fallacy; it is an impossible deception. The challenge is then to not only concern ourselves with self-protection. Instead, we must hold each truth, each reality, with both eyes open.
