Minding God's Business
Last week I had two client calls that went the same way. One, Russian-born and living abroad, carried the war in Ukraine into our session like a shadow they can’t shake. The other, American, pulled the Red–Blue fever into theirs, describing how even a grocery run feels like a ballot measure. Different people, same pattern: world affairs spilling into inner dialogue. By the end I wondered if I’d become a doomscrolling therapist.
What struck me wasn’t that they cared — they had every reason to. What struck me was how convinced each was that this particular chaos was somehow their responsibility to solve, absorb, or at minimum, fully understand. And the strange part? People with no connections, no family on the line, no direct stake at all still do the exact same thing.
Here's what I've learned to call the great category error of our time: mistaking the volume of something for its relevance to your actual life. Wars rage, markets crash, politicians perform their theatre, and we sit in our kitchens convinced we're somehow central to the drama. We're extras treating ourselves like leads in a movie we're not even in.
There are only three kinds of business in this world: mine, yours, and everything else. That last category is where earthquakes strike without our permission, governments make moves we never signed off on, strangers fight wars we can’t stop, pandemics spread, markets crash, natural disasters strike, and systems you never built and can’t rebuild collapse in slow motion. It’s the vast machinery of consequence that grinds on regardless of your opinion about it — that’s what we may call God’s business. The territory of forces larger than all of us combined.
Your business is simpler than you think. It's whether you slept enough last night. Whether you said what you meant in that conversation. Whether you're showing up as the person you actually want to be, not the person you think the world expects. It's your choices, your responses, your agreements, your perfect corner of influence.
Your business is the patch of earth where your choices actually take root. It's whether you return that phone call, forgive that grudge, or finally clean out the junk drawer that's been mocking you for six months. It's the interior work of noticing when you're lying to yourself and the exterior work of showing up when you said you would. Your business could be small and unglamorous but it's entirely yours.
Try this: For one day, notice when your mind wanders into territories you can't control. Catch yourself mid-scroll through disaster feeds. Feel the familiar tug toward problems that belong to presidents and generals and people whose names you don't know. Then ask: what in your actual life needs tending right now?
The garden metaphor isn't accidental here. You can spend all day worried about drought conditions three states over, but your tomatoes still need water. Your relationships still need attention. Your work still needs doing. The soil right in front of you — that's your business.
But we've gotten addicted to the illusion of global participation. We mistake consuming news for empathy, or even for contributing to solutions. We confuse having opinions about distant events with having actual influence. The machine sells us the fantasy that our worry somehow helps, that our outrage somehow matters, that our constant vigilance over things we can't control somehow makes us better people.
It doesn’t. It makes us exhausted, and not doing our work.
Ask yourself:
- What are you avoiding in your own life by focusing on problems you can't solve?
- When did you start believing your anxiety about world events was more important than your presence for the people who actually know your name?
- How much of your energy goes to minding everyone else's business while your own goes untended?
This isn't about becoming indifferent to suffering or retreating into selfish comfort. It's about recognising that scattered attention serves no one. It’s about knowing where your power actually lives. You can vote, you can donate, you can show up for your community. But you cannot fix everything, and your mental resources are finite. Every hour lost to global catastrophising is an hour stolen from the patch of world you could actually shape.
The most radical act in an attention-hijacked culture might be this: minding your own business. Literally. Attending to your work. Showing up for your people. Making your corner of the world a little more livable, a little more sane. That’s not selfishness — that’s how changing the world happens.
So maybe stop minding God’s business and start minding your own. The world doesn’t need more anxious spectators. It needs you doing the work that’s actually yours.