how do you remain psychologically alive when every institution profits from convincing you the world is ending?

my friends do not want kids ever.

lately i’ve been bracing for impact every passing hour. a new war, a new rape case, some brutal murder, child trafficking, tax fraud, cult violence, genocide. another headline that makes it sound like civilization is a building we’re all still standing inside while the demolition crew counts down from ten.

i scroll before i pee. i scroll before i sleep. i have, on more than one occasion, opened instagram specifically to check if the apocalypse has progressed since i last looked. it hasn’t, usually. it’s just progressing at the speed of everything, which is to say too fast to name and too slow to escape.

and some nights i genuinely think, is this it. is this the generation that gets to watch the credits roll. some of my closest friends have started saying they don’t want kids because why bring someone into this. i understand the feeling in my body before i understand it in my head. that’s usually how dread works, it skips the queue.

but here’s the thing i keep coming back to, the thing that both comforts me and slightly annoys me because it means i don’t get to feel special in my doom.

people have thought this before. all of them. every single one of your ancestors, going back further than you can casually imagine, sat somewhere and thought the world is ending and i am the one who gets to witness it. someone in Rome in 250 AD wrote something that basically translates to “kids these days, society is collapsing, nothing is sacred anymore.” the black death generation thought god had personally revoked the lease on earth. people during the world wars were certain, certain, that this was the final chapter. the cold war had entire populations building basements to survive an ending that never technically arrived, at least not that way.

so no, we are not the first people to feel like we’re standing at the end of history. we might just be the first people forced to attend everyone else’s ending at the same time, live, with notifications on.

that’s the actual shift. not that the world got worse. that the world got visible.

life imitates art

think about it structurally for a second. your great great grandmother’s village burned down, she knew it, she grieved it, it was hers to carry. today you can have breakfast and consume three genocides, five murders, a stock market crash, a wildfire, a plane crash, and someone’s ai startup replacing someone else’s entire career, before your coffee has gone cold. your nervous system was built to handle the threat of a tiger in the bushes. it was not built to hold the collective grief of a planet. we are asking a system designed for one village to metabolize seven billion villages simultaneously, and then we wonder why we feel like we’re losing our minds slightly, all the time, quietly, at 2pm on a tuesday for no reason.

it’s not that you’re broken. it’s that you’re the wrong hardware for this particular software update.

and then modernity does this cruel little extra thing on top, where it convinces you the anxiety is personal. we live inside a meritocracy that whispers if you fail, it’s because you didn’t try hard enough, not because luck exists, not because tragedy is sometimes just tragedy and not a referendum on your character. we live inside an individualism that tells you that you alone are responsible for building a spectacular, unrepeatable life, while simultaneously showing you a highlight reel of eight billion other people’s spectacular unrepeatable lives, so that your one ordinary tuesday feels like proof of failure rather than just, you know, a normal tuesday. we’ve stopped believing in anything larger than ourselves, so every small humiliation lands like it’s the whole story instead of a small opinion. we were sold a soulmate and got a person who is kind in six ways and infuriating in four, and we call that a disappointment instead of what it actually is, which is just being loved by a human. and news, god, news figured out early that outrage keeps you scrolling longer than hope does, so it feeds you catastrophe with the same techniques psychologists use to describe a depressed mind. catastrophizing. overgeneralizing. the news isn’t lying to you exactly. it’s just only telling you the worst true thing, over and over.

your feed is not reality. it is reality with the boring, kind, unremarkable parts surgically removed, almost engineered, because boring and kind don’t keep you watching.

and i want to be clear, i am not saying nothing is wrong. things are wrong. cruelty is real, it has always been real, it did not begin with the internet, it just used to happen without a camera on it. the mongols didn’t livestream. the partition wasn’t a thread. slavery didn’t have a comments section. human beings have been doing unspeakable things to each other for the entirety of recorded history, quietly, off camera, in the dark. the internet didn’t invent our cruelty. it just made it more obvious and visible.

voyage to Cythera

so what do you do with that. you can’t unknow it. going back to ignorance isn’t wise either. but doomscrolling every night until your chest is tight is not sustainable at all.

i have thought about this A LOT, i’ve discussed it with so many friends, and i’ve come to the conclusion that the actual skill is consuming enough of the world to stay connected to it without consuming so much that you start mistaking the feed for the territory. know enough to vote, to care, to show up. not so much that you forget the news rarely tells you the other half of the story, which is that someone, somewhere, is fixing something, quietly, without a headline.

that’s the part i think we’re actually starving for. not hope exactly, hope feels like a greeting card word at this point. what we’re missing is agency. the news tells you this happened, this happened, this happened, and almost never tells you here’s who’s working on it, here’s what actually changed, here’s the small unglamorous thing you could do about it. and a person who feels like nothing they do matters will eventually stop doing anything at all. that’s what happens to any living thing that’s told repeatedly that its actions are pointless.

and maybe this is the part i actually want you to leave with, more than any of the psychology, more than any of the history.

the world has always been ending. and people kept getting married anyway. they kept having the babies, the ones we’re now debating not having. they kept planting things that wouldn’t be ready to harvest for a year. they wrote books during actual plagues. they fell in love during actual wars. they built cathedrals they knew they would not live to see finished. every single generation that came before you was convinced, with total sincerity, that they were watching the last chapter, and most of them still showed up the next morning and built something anyway.

that’s not naive. that’s just what humans do. we build tomorrow while fully expecting it might not arrive.

sacrifice

i don’t think the goal is to convince yourself everything is going to be okay. i genuinely don’t know if it is. some things will get worse, i think that’s just honest. some things will get unimaginably better, quietly, without anyone filming it. the point was never to correctly predict which. the point is to stay soft enough, present enough, unfrightened enough, to be useful to whichever future actually shows up.

don’t confuse being informed with being wise. don’t confuse being tired with being right. and don’t confuse the ending you keep hearing about with the one that’s actually coming, because it turns out we’ve been hearing about it since rome, and somehow, annoyingly, there’s always a tomorrow that needs someone to still be capable of loving something in it.

i’m trying to be that someone. most days. some days i’m just doomscrolling in bed like everyone else. i think that’s allowed too.

ps : loving people, animals, flowers, feel-good cinema, fictional books, and art might help :p

yours with hope,

Nush <3