Hello everyone, I hope you all had a great week. This will be part 1 of series of blogs I will be doing in anticipation of a webinar Loraine and I will be presenting for the CBA in honour of World Mental Health Day on October 9, entitled: “Mental Health Reimagined: Unlocking the Power of the Subconscious Mind for Well-Being.” https://www.cbapd.org/details_en.aspx?id=ab_ab25ali05o&utm_source=ifz&utm_medium=em&utm_campaign=ab&_zs=t0p8o1&_zl=hk6r3
Last week I came across a post on LinkedIn which caught my attention. I took a screenshot of the image it attached. Here is what it said:
“Life is not a to-do list. It is a gift”
Wow. That line hit hard. What an incredible reframe! We should all post it in our office, on the fridge, or both. I searched online and found the original poster, Devina Sethia. The title of her piece is You Are Not a Machine: A Love Letter to the Human Soul. Here’s the link: https://buymeacoffee.com/devinasethia/you-are-not-machine-a-love-letter-human-soul
Please read the article when you get a chance. I I hope it serves as a powerful reminder to pause and nourish our souls. To stop thinking that pushing ourselves to the brink of collapse is the only way to succeed as a lawyer.
The article was also synchronistic. On an RMCC call a few days prior one of our wise and experienced lawyer volunteers on the call shared with the group of younger lawyers that if you look at a glorious sunset and do not feel even the tiniest bit of awe, then you know that is where you need to start to reconnect with your soul again. If you have not yet joined an RMCC zoom call please do so as soon as you can. You will not regret it.
The message is simple: As human beings, we were not built for endless output and to-do lists. We are not machines. In the age of AI it is so important to value what makes us human. Our soul thrives on that which cannot be seen, measured, compared, or valued with a dollar sign and yet, as law students, we learn to value the external and measurable over our intrinsic and intangible values.
As overworked lawyers under relentless pressure from every angle, we often disregard these sorts of messages as too soft. I know I sure did. It was not until I got the proverbial wake-up call and was forced to face my own mortality that I started to search for answers. I am embarrassed to admit that even surviving cancer in 2016 did not fully wake me, but at least it startled me enough to cause me to have the will to look inside and face how and why I allowed myself to become so lost.
Back then I would not have had time to read that beautiful poetic post ( or even this blog). I wouldn’t have heard the message. Or even if I did, I would not have given it much thought. I would have likely written it off as sentimental nonsense. I’m sure I would have thought that sort of stuff may work for some who had the luxury of not working 80+ hours a week and being on-call for the remaining 88. I certainly felt I did not have time to pause and look at a sunset, let alone contemplate the meaning of life or the nature of reality! Yet this is where life has led me. Even if you currently feel like I used to feel, please read on.
Sometimes I think maybe I was spared so I could live to find this opportunity to share some of my insights with law students and the broader legal community. To hopefully spark something to cause you to soften your heart, become more curious and start thinking more deeply about the big questions in life and begin looking into them for yourself and finding your own answers from within- so you will not need a painful and traumatic wake up call to compel you to do so. So you will not, God forbid, end up in the hospital one day and be forced to contemplate your life and wonder how it all went so wrong and why you did not wake up earlier. I do not want that to happen to you. Please learn from my mistakes.
It is so easy to become addicted to our suffering. Feeling joy becomes uncomfortable or foreign. We must break that addiction in order to become captains of our ship again. We cannot allow ourselves to become a collective of miserable, unhappy and ungrateful people and still achieve wonderful things in our life and career. Nor can we ever expect our profession to fix itself. By remaining miserable we certainly will be doing a great disservice to ourselves, our clients, our legal profession and, as I hope you will soon come to understand, even to humanity as a whole. Our bad moods, incivility and constant negative thought patterns do not just affect us individually. They do have an unfathomably large ripple effect.
I have had to battle my own demons to be able to share my thoughts with you. My fear of failure. Not feeling qualified. Fearing my writing is not good enough. Fear of speaking out against a broken system. Fear of ridicule or criticism. All based on fear. Until one day I chose to act, not because I was not scared anymore but because this matters so much. I did not become fearless; I just chose to act anyway. As Nike says, Just Do It!
Some may think that working on facing our inner demons and forgiving ourselves for past mistakes and ultimately evolving into a more kind, loving, caring, patient, honest, compassionate and virtuous soul will not make us better lawyers, or even worse, some may think doing so could even have the opposite effect. I could not disagree more.
I believe lawyers do, in fact, have souls (there are probably hundreds of lawyer jokes which may have just come to mind, and although laughter is the best medicine, self-deprecating humour is just not helpful at this point). Given the state of mental health in the legal profession (and in the world) today, I have come to the conclusion that our souls are very much in need of much more wonder, imagination, creativity, stillness, rest, music, joy, nature, connection, and all those other small moments we often take for granted but which are the very ones that will make life feel like a gift again. This is more than poetic, it’s protective.
And yet, in our noble profession, it often seems our shared humanity and desire to evolve our soul is rarely discussed. It appears that many have accepted (either consciously or unconsciously) that cultivating our soul and improving our skills as effective advocates are two incompatible goals and thus we must pick one or the other. We continue to equate worth with productivity, status with exhaustion, and rest with weakness. We wake up with stress as our first thought and we go to sleep with unfinished work, looming deadlines and apprehension of what tomorrow will bring buzzing in our minds. We trade presence for performance—until sadly many of us we begin to forget what true presence even feels like.
This is the trap which, speaking from experience, is so easy to fall into. Allowing our professional level pessimism and insecure overachieving natures to bleed into our psyche: measuring ourselves by the hours we sell rather than the values we live. Maybe we could say it’s not my fault because after all we are highly trained and rewarded for staying in the trap. But as the mental health data continually confirms, the personal and systemic cost of doing so is staggering.
Globally, mental health is one of the defining challenges of our time. The World Health Organization reports that more than one billion people are now living with mental health conditions. Depression remains a leading cause of disability WHO, 2022. Access to help is strained: in 2024, over half of U.S. psychologists reported they had no capacity for new patients (APA / Psychology Today, 2024).
For lawyers the situation is much worse than for the general population. As supporters of Asset and readers of this blog I am sure you all are very aware of this by now. Point in fact, last week Loraine reshared with you her incredible chart she created which shows the alarming stats from the 2022 National Study on the Psychological Health Determinants of Legal Professionals in Canada. Phase II of the study, released in 2024, reinforced the picture: mental health struggles of lawyers are not isolated, but systemic—woven into the culture of legal practice.
The majority of early-career lawyers are overwhelmed by workload, lack of autonomy, and the pressure to be perfect in a fiercely competitive environment where constant comparison is the norm. Senior lawyers report cynicism, disengagement, and emotional exhaustion. Across the profession, the evidence points in one direction: burnout is more and more becoming the norm, not the exception.
Why is the law such fertile ground for psychological distress? Sadly, there are too many possible reasons to go into detail here. As lawyers, our time becomes our currency - the value of our work measured in 6-minute intervals. This confuses our inherent value with our productivity. We start to believe we must be “on” 24/7, that rest must be earned, that presence is indulgence.
Such beliefs not only just drain us, they narrow our perception of life. Our very worth becomes conditional upon factors beyond our control. Slowly but surely, our humanity slips away and life loses its luster and even its meaning, causing not surprisingly many to turn to destructive distractions or worse as a means of relief and the chance of feeling something joyful again, even if ever so briefly. Unfortunately distractions are never a solution to the underlying root problem which is causing all of the suffering in the first place. This is the water our legal profession is swimming in. Many in that pool are getting very exhausted from dog paddling to keep their heads above water.
So what can we do? While we can and should have hope that systemic and cultural change will occur, I believe in 100% radical personal responsibility. I also believe in certain laws of nature which dictate that we must start with ourselves for any true lasting change to occur – not just inside ourselves but in the external world we experience on a daily basis.
I am going to delve deeper into these laws in upcoming blog posts this fall—but in the short-term, please pause to gaze at a sunset, or even the gorgeous colours emerging as we head into fall in just a few more days, and consider your response. Do you feel awe? Or do you give it a fleeting sideways look because you are too busy and have more important things to do.
This blog was a call to begin to redefine our perspective of success in law and life. To redefine it individually and collectively to shape the profession and world we want to see more of. A world based not on constant grind, hustle and burnout (survival of the fittest) but on compassion, collaboration, strength, learning and service of something greater than ourselves.
I believe we can change our perspective of our work and of ourselves to something that not only does not harm us, but to one that actually uplifts us and everyone around us. To one that empowers us to reach our full potential, remembering and focusing on what truly matters in life. One where we are concerned not just on enriching ourselves and being comfortable, but on continuously growing, learning, evolving and serving the greater good and making this world a better place in our own unique way. This is not only possible but I want to believe inevitable - a necessary part of the evolution of our soul.
So this weekend I am urging us all (myself included) to remember that we are not machines and life is more than our to-do list. So please take a moment (or two) and give yourself permission to find something that allows you to feel that awe again. Work will always be there, but when we make nourishing our soul a top priority then maybe we’ll begin to experience what it means to suddenly be “happy for no reason”. Let’s enjoy and be grateful for the ephemeral beauty in the present moment and be moved by the grandeur of nature, of which we all form such an integral part.
And, as I said earlier, please join us online at Red Mug Coffee Circle on Monday—all are welcome. We may not always be discussing the meaning of life and whether our work has caused us to become too numb to feel true joy, but you will certainly meet a great group of lawyers and newcomers to our profession, which may be a station on your journey to a richer and more fulfilling life and career.
Or if you would like some incredible practical instruction on how to regain your presence and stop ruminating about the past or worrying about the future, please make it a priority to join our online 15 minute Mindfulness classes every Tuesday at noon, and our Yoga classes every Wednesday at noon at the Knox Church in Calgary and also live streamed. Our instructors are amazing! I promise you will feel more joyful, calm and energized afterwards.
Have a wonderful weekend.
Marc