I-Ching 15 Humility

There are moments when the I Ching stops you mid-breath. When I drew Hexagram Fifteen, earth above and mountain below, I felt it asking me something I wasn't sure I was ready to answer but knew I was ready for. It asked me about my humility. And in sitting with that question, it quietly revealed something I had been at odds with: that in a world increasingly consumed by noise, performance, and the hunger for more, I had been finding it harder to locate my own.

That difficulty was clue enough that I needed to sit down with myself and really ask what it means to be humble right now, in this particular moment in history, in this particular climate of grandiosity and excess, and the relentless showcase of a life that is only partially true. Deep down I know we must all be aware that faking it is pointless right?? That having it all is impossible but also again… pointless.

The mountain sitting below the earth is a striking image. In most traditions, the mountain is the elevated thing, the place of perspective and vision. But here, in the I-Ching, it rests beneath. And I find myself wondering if that is precisely the point. That true humility is not the absence of height, it is the willingness to place that height in service of something greater than itself. To see clearly, and then to kneel anyway.

I think about this often in my work. I see people who are genuinely driven to become better, to change, to shed what no longer serves them. And underneath that drive is usually an unspoken knowing: that what they are consuming online is not a real representation of humanity. It cannot be. Because what the internet has become is, in many ways, the most elaborate mirror of our shadows that has ever existed. The endless hunger for validation. The spectacle of war and suffering scrolled past between advertisements. The constant, dizzying display of what other people have and what we are told we should want. And beneath all of it, the quiet truth that so many of the people consuming this content are doing so from a place of lack, searching for something they cannot name in a space that profits from that search, never-ending. It has made me feel personally guilty for wanting anything at all anymore.

I have been thinking lately that the internet has become the most complete modern illustration of the seven deadly sins we have ever produced. Not as a moral judgment, but as an observation. Pride, envy, greed, wrath, gluttony, sloth, lust. They are all there, packaged and optimized and delivered to us in an endless stream, dressed up as entertainment, aspiration, connection.

And so my question for myself has become both personal and something larger. Can I refuse to surrender my own humility? Not as a grand gesture, not as something I perform, but as a daily commitment. A small contribution to whatever life I have left and whatever it is I am here to do. It feels paradoxical, yet more important than ever if I can be honest about my own humility.

Because the stakes feel different now. Everything seems to carry a greater cost, literally and figuratively. The price of living, the price of choosing wrongly, the price of losing ourselves in the spectacle. We are standing at a threshold that most people can feel even if they cannot articulate it. There is a collective holding of breath. A sense that something is coming, something is shifting, and we are all watching it approach the way you watch a car begin to lose control. You cannot look away. There is something in the human wiring that leans toward the unfolding catastrophe, that wants to see how it ends.

And I do not fully understand that pull. The brain's attraction to the negative, to the worst possible outcome, to the morbid scroll. I know it is real. I know it is deeply human. I also know it is not the whole of us.

Because the other energy is there too. The one who knows right from wrong. The one that, in the aftermath of something shattering, suddenly recalls what actually matters and feels it with a clarity that ordinary life rarely offers. I want to believe that whatever threshold we are crossing, there will be people on the other side of it who walk away changed. Who feel that moment of humility return to them like something they forgot they owned. Who remember to tend to the things that are real.

The mountain is below. But it is still there. Still offering perspective to anyone willing to stop and look from a place of quiet rather than noise.

That is what I am reaching for. Not perfection, not answers, just the balance. The willingness to hold both the darkness and the light with open hands, and to keep choosing, however imperfectly, the version of humanity that still believes we are capable of something more.