We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For

Why organize when you can optimize?

We are still waiting

The fall I turned sixty, I realized I had been waiting my entire life for someone to tell me to stop waiting.

This revelation came to me not in some moment of transcendence but in the vitamin aisle of a CVS on Glendale Blvd., where I found myself staring at a display of melatonin gummies while a woman in athleisure explained loudly into her phone that she was "manifesting abundance" and "calling in her highest self." The phrase echoed in the fluorescent-lit corridor: We are the ones we have been waiting for. She said it twice, with the particular conviction of someone who had recently discovered a truth she believed to be both ancient and personally revolutionary.

I had heard this phrase before, of course. On bumper stickers. In Instagram captions. Printed on the kind of tea towels sold at airport gift shops alongside "Live Laugh Love" and other instructions for living that seem to assume we have forgotten how. But standing there among the sleep aids and joint supplements, listening to this woman invoke what she clearly believed to be some kind of spiritual directive, I began to understand something about the particular American genius for transforming collective wisdom into personal branding.

The phrase, I would later learn, has been attributed to the Hopi, though scholars remain skeptical of this provenance. It gained political currency during Barack Obama's 2008 campaign, where it served as both rallying cry and promise—a way of suggesting that change would come not from above but from within, from us, from our own untapped potential. It was hope as homework assignment.

But what I witnessed that day in CVS was something else entirely: the complete metabolization of political possibility into lifestyle choice. The woman on the phone wasn't talking about organizing her community or challenging systems of power. She was talking about her morning routine, her meditation practice, her journey toward becoming the person she had always been meant to be. She had taken "we" and made it exquisitely, completely singular.

This is what we do. This is what we have always done. We take the language of revolution and turn it into self-improvement. We transform calls to action into affirmations. We make the collective personal, and then we make the personal profitable.

I thought about this as I drove home through the canyon, past the houses with their meditation gardens and their Tesla charging stations, their solar panels and their Ring doorbells. Each home a small fortress of enlightened self-interest, each resident presumably working on themselves, becoming themselves, manifesting themselves into the people they had been waiting to become. Meanwhile, three thousand miles away, the Capitol dome gleamed in the January light as men in tactical gear walked through the halls of Congress, also believing, in their way, that they were the ones they had been waiting for.

This is the part we prefer not to discuss when we talk about becoming our authentic selves: that fascists, too, believe they are manifesting their destiny. That the militia member and the meditation teacher may be drawing from the same well of American self-actualization, the same belief that transformation is a matter of will, that we can think our way into a different reality. The aesthetic differs—sage smoke versus tiki torches—but the underlying mythology remains consistent. We are the protagonists of our own stories. We are the change we seek. We are the ones we have been waiting for.

But here is what strikes me as curious: if we are indeed the ones we have been waiting for, why does it feel so much like we are still waiting? Why do we scroll through our phones looking for signs while democracy burns down around us? Why do we buy books that promise to unlock our potential, attend workshops that claim to reveal our purpose, hire coaches to help us discover what we supposedly already know, all while voting rights disappear and the planet heats up and the social contract disintegrates in real time?

The answer, I think, lies in the particular cruelty of the phrase itself. It sounds like liberation—stop waiting, start becoming—but it functions as a kind of trap. Because if you are the one you have been waiting for, and you still don't feel like enough, then the problem isn't external. The problem is you. You haven't waited correctly. You haven't manifested properly. You haven't done the work.

This is perhaps the most insidious aspect of our current moment: the way personal transformation has become a substitute for political engagement. Why organize when you can optimize? Why confront systems of power when you can align your chakras? The woman in CVS wasn't manifesting abundance for everyone—she was manifesting it for herself, in a country where abundance has become increasingly concentrated among an ever-smaller group of people who have never had to manifest anything because they were born into it.

And so you wait some more. You wait for the right meditation app, the right life coach, the right retreat in Tulum that will finally unlock the person you are supposed to be. You wait for the moment when you will stop needing to become someone else and can simply be who you are. But that moment, curiously, never seems to arrive.

I remember reading once that Joan Didion said she wrote entirely to find out what she was thinking. Not what she should think, or what she wanted to think, but what she actually thought. This strikes me now as a different kind of waiting—not the waiting for transformation but the waiting for recognition. The patience to discover what is already there.

Perhaps this is the real prophecy hidden in the phrase: not that we must become the people we have been waiting for, but that we must stop waiting to become anyone at all. Perhaps the person we have been waiting for is not some improved version of ourselves but simply ourselves, exactly as we are, in this CVS, in this canyon, in this moment of ordinary bewilderment, in this country that is falling apart while we meditate on our individual enlightenment.

But I suspect that revelation, too, would eventually find its way onto a tea towel. And then we would have to find something else to wait for, some other way to avoid looking directly at the world we have actually created, the one where children practice active shooter drills while their parents practice mindfulness, where we optimize our morning routines while democracy itself becomes increasingly unrecognizable.

The Hopi prophecy, real or imagined, probably didn't anticipate Instagram wellness culture. But maybe it should have. Maybe the real test was never whether we would become the ones we had been waiting for, but whether we would be able to tell the difference between transformation and performance, between becoming and being, between the hard work of collective change and the seductive ease of personal betterment.

We are still waiting to find out.

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Image ©2025 Gael MacLean