Stop Trying to Fix Everything: Simran Jeet Singh on Spiritual Sanity
In overwhelming times, spiritual practice starts small—and stays true.
A Complexified podcast episode and an accompanying blog post by Wesley R. Moncrief, Research Assistant for the Institute for Religion, Politics & Culture. A passionate writer, researcher, and policy analyst interested in the intersections of complex ideals.
Stop Trying to Fix Everything: Simran Jeet Singh on Spiritual Sanity
In overwhelming times, spiritual practice starts small—and stays true.
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🌐 Complexified on RNS | Complexified Website
When the world feels too big to fix, it’s tempting to shut down—or spiral. In this intimate conversation, author and scholar Simran Jeet Singh joins Complexified to talk about what happens when we finally let go of the pressure to save the world, and instead tend to our corner of it with humility, joy, and spiritual grounding. Drawing from Sikh wisdom and his own experience of burnout, Simran invites us to trade ego-driven change for something more lasting: connection, presence, and compassion that transforms us from the inside out. If you’ve ever wondered how to keep caring without collapsing, this one’s for you.
Simran Jeet Singh is a scholar, writer, and public advocate known for his work at the intersection of religion, justice, and culture. He is the author of The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life and Executive Director of the Aspen Institute’s Religion & Society Program. A proud Sikh American, Simran writes and speaks widely on equity, empathy, and the power of small, meaningful acts to create lasting change.
Complexified is a weekly interview podcast hosted by Rev. Dr. Amanda Henderson from the Iliff Institute for Religion, Politics & Culture, and Religion News Service.
Each episode dives into the most pressing news stories at the crossroads of religion and politics, exploring the nuances that are often go overlooked.
Whether religiously curious, politically frustrated, or somewhere in between, Complexified brings you conversations that challenge assumptions and spark fresh insights.
The Blog Post ✍️
This week on Complexified, Amanda spoke with Simran Jeet Singh about how change isn’t always from a macro perspective, but from the small acts we commit ourselves to everyday, and how cultural shifts have to come from both a sociocultural shift as well as from the personal, through tending one’s self and one’s community to be resilient, organized, and unified in purpose.
While I find myself resonating with all of this and agree that the work is varied in scope and function, I think this episode of Complexified was the most challenging for me to engage with emotionally.
I believe that it stems from my social location as someone in their late 20’s, at the liminal space between millennials and Gen Z, and the way that has shaped what social justice looks like to me. For example, since I can remember, I have never lived in a world in which the knowledge of an impending climate disaster has not been present.
Despite this, climate policy, although it has made some strides, has not been significant enough to make a different future possible. It is easy to blame this on people who claim that climate change is not real, or that anyone concerned with it is simply an alarmist, but just as much to blame are people who claim to acknowledge the scope of the danger, have the power to implement change, but insist bold strokes will shake the boat too much down the road.
Amanda and Simran talk about hopelessness and how a portion of the population that feels “a sense of self-righteousness and urgency” has abated in recent months following Trump’s second electoral victory. They posit that within that community, there may be a sense of being shellshocked by his victory and not yet arriving to the generative place of hopelessness, freeing them to connect with others.
In my opinion, this misses the mark. The conversations I had with many of my peers in the past decade have been filled with equal parts hopelessness and determination. Being told your entire life that the world is on a clock, growing older and watching it tick down all while people waste that precious time actively shortening it, debating its very existence, or kicking it down the road in a vain hope that the future will be more equipped tends to leave a significant toll on the ability to maintain any hope. It is no coincidence that America is in a mental health crisis, nor is it a coincidence that the most affected group of that crisis is young Americans.
I once again want to affirm the importance of maintaining generative practices of community and self-care, in addition to seeking change within the world. I believe Amanda and Simran provide an excellent blueprint for both beginning and continuing those actions to bear fruit. However, I think this disappearance of “self-righteousness and urgency” is more bleak.
While the climatological tipping point has not yet been definitively reached (though we are dangerously close), the decades of inaction and the current political climate continuing to enact policies that further abuse our world leaves many young people disabused of any notion of sweeping change coming from the American form of government.
I don’t see much point in wasting breath arguing the economics or optics of shifting our society to one that more responsibly approaches our impact on the environment. To my knowledge, I was born condemned to ecological collapse, not in a sense of “everything dies in time” but in a way that feels more akin to waking up tied to train tracks as the train moves inexorably closer and everyone surrounding me is arguing what the most effective way to free me without damaging the tracks, or if the oncoming train is even as close as it seems.
When Amanda and Simran talk about the silence, I would argue that the silence isn’t because we’ve stopped talking; it’s simply that we’ve shut the doors to anyone who doesn’t understand what we’re saying. We’ve shouted ourselves hoarse, tied to the tracks, and now we’re simply awaiting the inevitable.
I am beginning to lose count of the friends who have confided in me their uncertainty about bringing children into the world, all centered on a belief that to bring a child into a dying world is inherently cruel. Their desire to build a family is overridden by the bleak hopelessness they’ve been born into, and the seemingly unchanging trajectory that we are collectively set upon. This, paired with the lack of autonomy Amanda and Simran explore, has led them past hopelessness to despondency.
I recognize that this post feels as if it has diverted far from the content of Complexified’s episode, but the example of climate change felt it best encapsulates what is missed in their analysis, which is that for many peers my age, sweeping political action is assumed to be mostly a dead end already, but one that must be pursued regardless because of its significance.
Speaking purely for myself, it feels as if we are on the precipice, and there is a razor-thin tightrope we can walk to a future where flourishing is a possibility, and we need to shape up and begin working on our balance. I can guarantee that young people my age are engaging in community and self-care, because the alternative is untenable. Both halves of this conundrum are represented by the fact that Gen Z has much higher reported rates of poor mental health, as shown above, while also being much more likely to seek out or receive mental health services. I do not want to live in a world that is not just dying, but actively being killed, and then feel chastised for demanding a better world for the future generations that may never be.
The world is not changing rapidly enough to match the urgency we’ve been told is necessary from childhood, so while I agree that you must practice self- and community-care, a large portion of that community-care must be centered on understanding those within your community and their struggles and pain. Engage with people in their 20’s and 30’s earnestly and listen. Support young & passionate politicians pushing for bold strokes, because without a promise for something better, you will lose the trust and energy of the younger generation entirely.
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