What Do We Lose When We Stop Believing Our Actions Matter?

"What can I do with all this craziness?"

A brilliant engineer said that to me once, and I suspect he said what most of us have been thinking but have not quite found the words for, or perhaps we have found the words, and simply have not known who to say them to.

By "craziness", he meant the world we are all living in right now. And what struck me most was not the question itself, but the feeling underneath it: a genuine, intelligent person who had stopped believing that his actions could change anything in the world we are living in. My answer to him was simple: you can do a lot. A stone does not need to see where its ripples end to know they are moving. You start with yourself, with your immediate circle, with the people around you. That is always the beginning. But it never ends with yourself.

I have been returning to that conversation a lot lately, because that feeling he named is one that, if we are honest, most of us recognise.

Where does it actually come from?

The psychologist Martin Seligman spent decades studying what he called "learned helplessness": what happens when people face repeated situations where nothing they do seems to change the outcome. We know this feeling. The conversation you stopped having because it never led anywhere. The idea you stopped raising because the answer was always the same. Faced with that experience often enough, the brain makes a calculation and stops trying, collapsing into a kind of all-or-nothing thinking: nothing I do matters. And this, Seligman was clear, is not a personal failing. It is a predictable human response to an impossible set of conditions.

But we feel this on a much larger scale too. It is the moment we look at the state of the planet, the state of our institutions, the world our children will inherit, and think:where do I even begin?

That feeling has a name. Researchers Uzbay and Erdoğan recently published a landmark paper in Theory and Society on collective learned helplessness: the shared passivity that builds when whole communities face prolonged conditions where their efforts consistently meet the same walls. We feel this too when we look beyond our own lives: the planet is being destroyed, so what can I actually do to stop it? Inequality is deepening, so where do I even begin? That experience of failure spreads through relationships, hardening into a collective belief: that nothing will change, so why try. It becomes so woven into daily life that we stop noticing it is there. And crucially, this weight is not carried equally. Those whose ways of thinking, being, or moving have always met systems never designed for them have been navigating this landscape long before the rest of us had a name for it.

And now, into that already fragile landscape, arrives the polycrisis: climate disruption, geopolitical instability, economic uncertainty, and the rapid rise of AI, not as separate pressures but as an entangled, amplifying system generating experiences of powerlessness at a scale and speed we have not encountered before. AI sits at the centre of that friction in a particular way, not as a villain, but as a force reshaping how knowledge is created and shared faster than most of us can reckon with, reaching into our sense of what we are still needed for, and what remains irreducibly human. That question, once philosophical, has become urgently practical.

And what does this produce in the world around us?

When a felt sense of agency erodes at scale, the consequences are measurable. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report found that global employee engagement has fallen to just 20%, matching the lowest levels of the pandemic era, with each percentage point representing roughly 20 million additional people moving through their days without believing their contribution matters. The UN's World Social Report warns of a global social crisis, with the majority of the population struggling under systemic economic insecurity. And the Edelman Trust Barometer finds that fewer than a third of people globally believe the next generation will be better off. These are the downstream effects of collective helplessness: disengagement, disconnection, and a profound loss of belief in the future.

For those of us in leadership, research on emotional contagion in organisations adds something worth sitting with: helplessness does not stay contained within individuals. It spreads through relational networks, shaping team cultures and our collective capacity for action. One study found that a manager's stress measurably increases employee stress for up to a full year. A leader who has lost their own felt sense of agency is not simply having an interior experience. They are shaping the conditions in which the people around them either find or lose theirs.

The contagion works in both directions.

So what do we actually lose when that connection breaks?

Psychologist C.R. Snyder spent decades establishing that hope is not a feeling but a structure, built from two things working in tandem: agency thinking, the belief that you can move toward something, and pathways thinking, the belief that routes exist to get there. When the link between what we do and what happens is severed, both collapse together. And what collapses with them is not simply productivity or engagement. It is something harder to name: the felt sense that your particular presence, your particular way of knowing, Being and Doing, the very things that add meaning to our lives, belongs somewhere and is needed.

This is where AI enters the picture. It can give you instant answers, broader data, faster synthesis, and it will continue to do so with increasing sophistication. But there is a difference between having access to answers and feeling genuinely alive in your own knowing. AI can replicate the former. It cannot give you the latter: the felt sense of your own Knowing in genuine motion, in contact with the world within you and around you. That is not a small distinction. It is, in fact, everything.

That is what is at stake when helplessness takes hold. And that is what is worth recovering.

So what does agency actually feel like, and how do we find it again?

Agency, at its simplest, is the felt sense that your Knowing is alive as you lead its flow, in contact with the world within you and around you, not managed from a distance but actually lived from within it.. Most of us have felt this energy at some point, in a conversation that genuinely changed us, in work that felt like it mattered, in a moment of real encounter with another person. And most of us know, equally, what it feels like when that contact is lost.

This is something I have come to understand more deeply through the work of Knowledge Mindfulness (KMD), where Knowing, Being, and Doing are treated not as separate capabilities but as a living, interconnected system, always cyclical, always moving, the me in service of the we, and the we in service of the me. What collective helplessness does, at its most fundamental, is narrow the windows through which that knowing flows: the Inner Window of values and intuition, the Relational Window of how we show up with and for each other, and the Outer Window of the world and its emerging signals, what we call the Golden Triangle. When these windows contract, so does our capacity to act, to connect, and to believe our presence changes anything. What opens them again is real encounter, honest reflection, and the willingness to know together rather than alone. And recent research confirms what KMD has long understood: fully realised hope is never justI can. It is always, at its deepest, we can.

So what can we do with all this craziness?

In the deep ocean, where no light reaches from the surface, the majority of living creatures produce their own illumination. Not because conditions have become favourable, and not because the environment has grown less pressured, but because bioluminescence is simply what they are: beings who generate light from within, without waiting for the darkness to lift before they begin. We are no different. We are living creatures navigating our own ocean, and our light is our Knowing. Evolving our Knowledge Maturity means evolving the strength and reach of that light, and its illumination on others. When our Knowing, Being, and Doing come together cohesively through the 3Cs loop and the Golden Triangle, this energy becomes a powerful illuminating force. And when individual lights combine, something shifts in what becomes navigable, not because the darkness has been eliminated, but because collective light sees further and guides more steadily than any single source can alone. The opposite is equally true: when there is fragmentation rather than cohesion, our light depletes individually and collectively, and we become increasingly subject to the external forces of the world around us, carried by the current rather than moving within it with intention and courage.

The polycrisis is real, and it should not be minimised. But so is this: the quality of your Knowing, that unique light that emerges from your particular inner and outer world coming in contact with each other harmoniously, cannot be taken from you.

How bright do you think your emerging light is? And what would you do to make it stronger?

Knowing to Live, Living to Know.

With care for “ALL”, Dr. Laila Marouf and the KMD Team