What the f*ck is morality in 2025?

Virtues for When Things Fall Apart

Light Hive uses Buddhist frameworks, play, and engaged practice to explore identity and the polycrisis. I identify as a queer, transracial adoptee who writes, thinks, and facilitates. I am neither a licensed mental health provider, nor a formally authorized teacher within any Buddhist lineage.

---

Hi friends,

One week into the new presidential term, many of us may be wondering why even bother with ethics.

But in this second essay in our series on the perfections or pāramī (PAH-rah-mee), I offer thoughts to help us relate to ourselves and each other, even in these times of tension, upheaval, and fear. My first post in the series was on generosity. This post is on sila, or morality and virtue.

These can feel like loaded words, I know. Let’s unpack them.

Sila

Morality and virtue are about living in harmony with others.

The five lay precepts aren’t so much “rules,” as they are methods for harmonizing with others and oneself. This is my rendition of the five precepts that outline ethical practices, alongside more common translations about what to avoid.

1. Cultivate and celebrate vitality || do no harm

2. Give and receive responsibly || refrain from taking that which is not given

3. Respect the impacts of physical contact (inclusive of platonic touch) || refrain from sexual misconduct

4. Practice skillful speech || avoid harmful, malicious, false speech

5. Protect your open awareness || avoid intoxicants that lead to reckless behavior

Practice these things and you will work toward "the bliss of blamelessness." At scale, these precepts help create kinder relationships and communities.

The first precept—cultivating vitality while avoiding harm—feels particularly relevant as we navigate our present moment.

Cultivating vitality

Respect agency and remember we are impermanent, imperfect beings. Enjoy your time.

If you have felt activated in the past couple weeks for one reason or another, you are in good company. It is entirely acceptable to experience a range of emotions. Fear, love (sometimes you need to look for it, but it always emerges with anger and fear), anxiety. These emotions are okay because we are not these emotions. They are arising, they are not indictments of who we are.

When we confuse thoughts and feelings with who we are, we limit our capacity to be responsive. Over-identification with or, on the flip side, denial of these emotions limits our vitality.

What I have been calling “integration”—an allowing of these states to exist without judgement, to give one a fuller palate of responses—Gabor Maté might call “wholeness.” As he writes in The Myth of Normal,

None of us need be perfect, nor exercise saintly compassion, nor reach any emotional or spiritual benchmark […] All we need is readiness to participate in whatever process wants to unfold within us so that healing can happen naturally.

Anyone, no matter their history, can begin to hear wholeness beckoning, whether in a shout or whisper, and resolve to move in its direction. With the heart as a guide and the mind as a willing and curious partner, we follow whatever path most resonates with that call.

Participate, process, resolve to follow the path, through stillness or action.

I want to honor that listening with both heart and mind may be difficult for many of my queer, immigrant, and AFAB siblings right now. Fear can drive us into survival mode, obscure our options, and shuffle us into “sticky” narratives about self and society. 2025 has opened with definitively traumatizing times. Staci K. Haines’ definition in The Politics of Trauma:

Trauma is an experience, series of experiences, and/or impacts from social conditions, that break or betray our inherent need for safety, belonging, and dignity. They are experiences that result in us having to vie between these inherent needs, often setting one against the other.

Yet just like that, Haines offers ways for cultivating vitality that feels fitting amid these headlines. We cultivate safety for and within ourselves. We foster belonging for our emotions and each other. We protect our own and each other’s dignity.

It’s your right and responsibility to noodle on what safety, belonging, and dignity means for you, provided there’s minimal to no harm toward others. You're already doing this in ways you might not recognize—like reading an essay with “morality” in the title.

And, as much as your practice allows, embody safety, belonging, and dignity with an attitude of joy that we are still here.

Joy might take some refocusing or imagining otherwise. Both work to massage our social and behavioral conditioning, exercise our lazy brains, and rebel against a political economy that makes dreaming a luxury, as Ruha Benjamin describes in Viral Justice.

And for many of us, see(k)ing joy would indeed be a rebellion against our own habit patterns. This why I offer spaces to intentionally work with what’s arising, in the form of play. To exercise our responsiveness and move our minds differently.

Because we always get to choose.

Cultivating vitality creates internal resources, but ethics are ultimately relational. Let’s think about how we talk to each other in times of crisis.

Crisis dialogue

Do you need to be heard or held? Communication when everything feels urgent.

I am a proponent of dialogue about the hard stuff. And, I confess, there are times I can review the basics of what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “the art of communicating.”

We are yet human.

Skillful speech and equanimity has felt like a distant afterthought in the exhausting year that has been the past few weeks. I’ve fled from ember storms, signed a cpr/dnr form for my cat, worried about air quality and hydroclimate whiplash, and been susceptible to the president’s fear tactics.

Adoptees are famously ill-equipped to self-soothe. No one can replace those first experiences when there was no care-taker to hold us or “heal” the disenfranchised grief that persists throughout our lifetimes. Pete Walker, in Complex PTSD, calls circular rambling “verbal ventilation,” an expression of grief for something that never was for people who have experienced systemic disempowerment.

On the listener end, there is a common psychological bias toward status quo and “resilience” over adaptability. This, too, is not an indictment. People want to help. Well-intentioned friends tried to triage fascism over the phone, only to suggest I medicate climate catastrophes away. (Not ashamed to say I’m already on prescription meds.)

With mixed feelings, I’ll report I’m not the only one gently pathologized for being awake and verbose. Just as emotions can be contagious, so are their denial and suppression. Psychotherapist Katherine Morgan Schafler writes,

We are coming dangerously close to operating under the notion that being upset for more than a few hours means you’re unhealthy. It’s somewhat surprising to me that we haven’t turned crying into a disorder.

Despite our collective trauma, not least from (ongoing) COVID fallout, so many people struggle to engage in dialogue about the complex issues that keep us traumatized. “Mature” restraint and emotional distancing is how most people “adult.” Schafler continues with this invitation:

Give yourself permission to hurt. Holding space for your difficult, probably diametric experiences looks like allowing your painful emotions to exist without trying to cookie-cut them into heart and star shapes. Pain isn’t supposed to be cute.

Your pain does not need a makeover; your pain needs permission to stay unkempt. Difficult emotions need to be allowed to lie there like a brick. They’re feelings, not who you are.

So how do we show up for each other in the middle of these emotional conversations?

I suggest structure for the verbal ventilator and guidelines for the listener: “do you need to be heard or held?” Asking gives the ventilator choice-based agency and the listener clarifying context, while protecting both parties’ boundaries and bandwidth.

To hear someone might mean thought partnership, identifying actionable pathways.

To hold someone, no matter the distance, is to validate the difficulty and provide emotional comfort.

In this kind of dialogue, it would be vital to avoid unilateral decisions for another. Do what you can to cultivate their agency and own yours by using “I” language, instead of things like “You need…you’re not ready…”

That said, to be present for our own needs and those of others, it would help to gift ourselves a rare commodity these days: attention.

Protecting an open awareness

Slow your scroll and imagine otherwise.

The fifth precept has to do with avoiding intoxicants.

One goal with this is to retain an open and focused mind, so that we can remain responsive to changing worldly conditions. It’s harder to be in harmony with others when we are intoxicated with alcohol or money or power or fear and panic.

Social media platforms act as modern intoxicants, offering validation on a good day but often leaving us anxious and disconnected. Reducing social media use through methods like deleting apps and grayscale mode can help.

But now that we’re on our screens less, or at least trying to be, what do we do with all this time and energy? Whatever you like, my friend! Start a garden. Talk to your neighbors. Go for walk.

I have found narrative, dramatic/theatrical, and table-top play powerful tools for practicing indirectly with the precepts, developing open, imaginative, and adaptive thinking. In their book, Your Brain on Art, Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross write of live theater as life changing.

The act of rehearsal is key to disrupting habits that no longer serve us in order to replace them with new habits that do. By offering individuals who are returning to society an opportunity to rehearse, in a safe space, the kinds of daily activities that they will encounter in society, they are given a chance to practice living, but with less risk.

Play can be close enough to real-life to build real skills, while being abstract enough to feel safe. Play helps us build agency and responsiveness.

For example, Jay Dragon’s award-winning game, Wanderhome runs on a “belonging outside belonging” system, wherein players cultivate safety for their own trauma-informed communities. In thoughtful, kind ways, agency is built into the social system, helping us practice new ways of being.

The game’s instructions on “having fun together”:

We all have different ways we travel. Some of us love to chatter away, describing everything we see and starting up conversations with every stranger on the road. Other people prefer to sit back and let the world pass by them. Some of us might not even want to ever go to a table, and would prefer to sit with the book and read by the fire. By checking in with each other and letting each other know how we feel, we can make sure we’re all having fun. If one of our friends isn’t really chatting much, they might be bored—but they might also just be sleepy, or maybe they’d just rather draw pictures in their sketchbook.

As Wanderhome's guidelines demonstrate, even the way we approach play itself can embody these precepts: checking in with each other, respecting different play styles, and prioritizing collective wellbeing over individual preferences.

This kind of practice creates muscle memory for behavior that we can carry into our daily lives.

So what are ethics and virtues in 2025? They’re how we keep going, together.

Takeaway Practice

A script for the “heard or held” question.

“Gosh, this seems like a lot. Would it feel supportive to just breathe together for a minute? We could do it together. [Allow any respectful response]

I just read in an article this phrase, ‘heard or held.’ Kinda cheesy, but one is like problem-solving and one is just listening. Which might be more beneficial for you right now? How can I support you?”

If they say, “I don’t know,” default to care. Sit with them. They need support, not judgement or gaslighting, and if you aren’t in a position to provide it, it is most helpful to say so.

What do you need? To be heard or held? These kinds of questions help us live more harmoniously together.

February Events

Creative Coalition: February 8 & 9, 3-5 PST

The Creative Coalition centers mindful play—a different game each month—to embody our not-selves, work with change, and practice interpersonal safety.

Let’s play Wanderhome! Our focus will be on building safety, belonging, and dignity with a shared narrative. To be clear, this “game” has no points or win state. We’re co-creating a way to be in harmony with each other, regardless of how awkward, silly, or fantastical it may feel.

To keep the container intimate, this game will be maxed at 6 participants. Bring a friend! (If there’s interest beyond 6 people, I’m happy to run this again later.)

You don’t need to buy anything; all you need is a willingness to try.

On Feb 8th, we’ll meditate, discuss the game, set the scene, and customize our characters and relationships. Participation is required to join the next day.

On Feb 9th, we’ll meditate, jump right into improvised collaborative storytelling, and close with a debrief.

• Regular Price: $80

• Reader Rate: $32 (code: hive60)

• Adoptee Rate: $8 (honor system, code: hive90)

• No one is turned away for lack of funds. If the registration fee is cost-prohibitive, please ask for the link via email or DM. Here’s a whole essay about my thoughts on “payment.”

---

Bio

Logan Juliano, PhD (they/them) is a writer, educator, facilitator, everyperson at Light Hive, and continuing lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles. They hold a PhD in Performance Studies and a deep love for Superman ice cream.