My TEDx talk!

Grief as activism: Learn to grieve, create a world without racism

To my dearest community, 

I feel really honoured to share with you my TEDx talk which is titled - Grief as activism: Learn to grieve, create a world without racism. 

You can watch it below.. And if it moves you, please do share it with your people - it’s such an important message that I really want to share with those who are here to hear it. 

And I want to share with you a little more on how it came to be. 

Earlier this year I got the opportunity to give a TEDx talk here in Ibiza. Yesterday Jack and I were watching it for the first time and he asked me if I was so excited to share this with the world. And I was like actually not entirely!

Soon after we moved to Ibiza Jack mentioned to me that they were doing a TED here. I went onto the website to apply, there was only 30 minutes before application close and the whole talk just came to me in that moment in a single download. The funny thing is the last time I had this experience was when I wrote my article performative allyship is deadly back in 2020. 

The morning I wrote that article - I literally sat down one day, picked up a pen and wrote it in one. I have no idea where it came from, I hadn’t been thinking about it. I didn’t really write before this. It just came from somewhere beyond me. And that piece hit on something in the collective that was wanting to be expressed and just happened to express through me at that time. 

The difference is then I was writing to 4 subscribers on an unknown medium blog, now I’m sharing with my online community of 50 thousand or so people. And so when I watched the talk back and I saw how directly I’m pointing to a truth that will definitely offend some people, my personality is like - umm no thank you! Be responsible for the personal consequences of saying what’s true? People unfollowing or thinking I’m mean or dangerous. I think I’ll pass! Can’t we just be diplomatic and safe and not rock any boats? Are we really going to put ourselves out there like this? And the answer from my soul - yes. Because I’m pointing to something I see in the collective which I can’t not.

Which is - that modern social justice has lost the thread. Activism, in many locations, isn’t about the cause at all anymore but a way for us to feel significant, or like we are good people, or like we belong to something - and importantly to express the (often unrelated) pain we are in. I see this everywhere in the anti-racism movement, the gender dissolution movement, climate even. 

I noticed it first in myself back in 2020 when I was really campaigning for racial justice. But at a point I realised that a lot of what I was calling desire for justice was really a desire for vengeance, the socially acceptable expression of unprocessed pain I was carrying around my race and other things. It was all super entangled and not at all clean but dressed up in a morally good “activist” outfit. And like many other people of colour at the time, expressing my pain was getting me validation and significance online - a super addictive cycle that feels like power but is actually very disempowering. If you were here in 2020 and remember, I spoke about this whole exploration in my live with Ester Perel and my friend Jeremy Goldberg and I got slammed. I literally got hate mail from people calling me an uncle tom and a minstrel. Someone even wrote to me to say it was “people like me” who got Trump elected 😂

But I was pointing to something true that I saw which was why people got so rocked. That this kind of activism, wokeness, cancel culture, that whole thing - comes from an immature part of the collective consciousness. I don’t mean immature as in bad, just that it is young. I see it as like the toddler part of us thrashing around expressing its pain and outrage and sadness just to get it out. Looking for love and belonging and identity. But this toddler is dressed up in its mummy’s clothes, masquerading as an adult with big words and fancy frameworks. But really it’s a young part of us that is in pain and doesn’t know how to be with that.

That in itself is not a problem, the problem is that our culture has created a set of social incentives for us to stay in this toddler phase and it has convinced us to believe the fancy dress. It’s a distortion that has calcified in our social structures. And that is actually quite a big problem. Many people have pointed to this. But what I see happens at this point is another distortion. In noticing the problem of this kind of activism people go on the attack - “these people are entitled víctims just wanting attention”. Perhaps true. But it misses the thing too. It has no compassion for our humanity and why people express in this way (which in my view is that the toddler part of us doesn’t know any other way to be with that pain).

And then it just picks up the same useless approach. The war on wokeness. Same sh*t. Different war.

We need a way out. A trapdoor. Out of this endless cycle of warring. I believe grief is one of those trapdoors. I actually think it’s the first one. The gateway to all else. 

I feel many people are waking up to this. Myself included. 

This talk is my contribution to that awakening. And I feel really honoured to share it, especially with you - people who have been with me along the road. 

If it moves you, please feel free to share it with your people. 

Thank you for being here. 

I love you, 
Holiday