Seeing Humanity Beyond The Exhaustion
It's getting tricky, isn't it?
I call this space World-Weary because that’s how I feel.
We’re all fucking tired.
We’re all grinding day by day, spending most of our lives at work trying desperately to keep our heads above water. We’re drowning in debt. We’re watching the cost of rent, of food, of the little things we enjoy, the things that make life worth living — it’s all skyrocketing.
We’re watching injustices pile up. We’re seeing our fellow human beings be beaten down, often literally, sometimes killed on screen to the sound of cheers. We’re watching genocide trend on social media with TikTok dances and catchy music.
Empathy is being demonized. An ‘every man for himself’ sort of mentality is now the norm. Going it alone and isolating yourself is being encouraged.
Free spaces where people used to be able to just relax and enjoy themselves are going away. There used to be places where you could just sit down, talk to your friends in public, read a book perhaps, and not be required to pay.
Those spaces are disappearing. It’s not just in the States, either, Americans — it’s happening elsewhere, too. I rarely see park benches downtown in my area anymore, and they used to be all over.
They removed them so the local homeless can’t sleep on them. We’re making our downtown spaces hostile to force them to the fringes. After all, why bother helping people if you can just shove them into the corner where you don’t need to see them?
That was sarcasm, but it’s a very real attitude that we’re seeing more and more of these days.
All of this is not an accident. If you look closely, you’ll see that it all has a common underlying cause.
We’re losing our sense of community.
Humans are social creatures. Our mental and physical health, our basic survival strategy that we’ve evolved over tens of thousands of years is to cooperate with one another for mutual benefit.
We get by through leaning on each other. Working as a collective, we are strong and adaptable.
Alone? We’re sitting ducks.
It is easier to enforce control on an individual who doesn’t have a support structure than to interrupt strong social bonds of community. There’s a reason hate groups and cults target disaffected loners for recruitment.
When you’re alone, you become desperate for connection. Any connection. Even toxic connection. So long as you can feel like you belong to a group, you will do what you need to do to conform.
If you’re wondering why so many people won’t leave MAGA in spite of knowing how badly Trump is fucking everything up, this is why.
With people now so desperate just to grind out a meagre survival with no chance of building that community with the people around them, you have generations of people who are open to being manipulated by false information.
Or worse, too apathetic to even care about anything beyond their own daily grind. Why bother trying to change anything? Caring just makes you depressed and helpless.
If you’ve ever had a Conservative family member poke you with statistics about how Conservatives tend to be happier and Progressives tend to be depressed and anxious, this is exactly why.
If you don’t care beyond your immediate surroundings, life is less stressful.
If you care about each other, it’s impossible to be filled with joy right now.
But that is not a weakness. Cooperation is our super power that has been the foundation of our survival, our greatest tool for progress and growth all throughout human evolution.
Our cities, our global achievements, would never have been possible without it.
Our ability to collectively gather and organize is being stripped away, we’re being turned against each other, we’re being cut off from our community and gathering spaces are being put behind paywalls because it makes us easier to control.
But now that we know what’s happening, we know how to fight back.
Mutual aid and collective action is our path to victory. We have to reject isolation and teach ourselves to see humanity again. We have to remind ourselves that empathy is a muscle, and you can choose to exercise it.
There’s a reason I sign off every single essay I write with the same two words:
Solidarity wins.