Is anyone else just... sick of everything?
Sometimes you can just look at the world and think, “this is fucked,” and leave it at that. You don’t always have to figure out what it means. You can just let it be what it is.
Hello, friends! Whether this lands in your inbox or you’re catching up on the site, thanks for reading. This post is different from the usual frameworks and systems. It’s actually one of my journal entries from last week that I wasn’t sure I’d end up sharing. If you’ve been feeling heavy lately, or sick of the discourse, or exhausted by the constant noise, maybe it helps to know you’re not alone in it. And if it does, I hope you’ll share it with someone else who’s also just... tired.
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I don’t know what to say lately. I mean, I’m still having thoughts and ideas, but everything feels so negative and heavy. I’ll think there’s something I want to talk about or discuss, but then I sit with it for a minute and think, “what’s the point?” So now, somewhere between the thought and the page, something’s getting lost. Or maybe not lost… maybe I just don’t care enough to chase it down.
Maybe it’s end-of-year moodiness or the nonstop terrible news cycles, but I don’t think that’s quite it. What I’m feeling isn’t exactly sadness or depression or even fatigue, it’s closer to… disgust. Or maybe even disdain. Like I’m looking around at the state of things and thinking, “really? we’re still doing this?” The discourse is exhausting. The performative certainty is exhausting. The way everyone has to have a take on everything, immediately, with full confidence, is exhausting!
And maybe this is the problem. Maybe what I’m bumping up against is that the things I’m thinking about don’t have solutions or resolve into neat takeaways or useful frameworks, they’re just observations about the state of things, like how exhausting it is to watch people perform certainty when everything’s uncertain. Or how the discourse has become so calcified that even trying to have a nuanced thought feels like you’re asking to be misunderstood on purpose. Or how we’ve all gotten so good at talking that we’ve forgotten how to just sit with the uncomfortable truth that sometimes things are just bad and there’s no clever way to reframe it.
I think about this a lot lately. The way we’ve trained ourselves to immediately process every observation into content, every feeling into insight, every pattern into something shareable, like we’re all walking around with this internal editorial board that won’t let anything through unless it has utility. Unless it teaches something or helps someone or moves the conversation forward in some measurable way. And I get it... I’ve built my entire publication around that impulse. Frameworks and systems and guides designed to help people make sense of their lives. But sometimes I look at the world and think, “I don’t want to make sense of this. I just want it to finally be different.”
There’s an exhaustion that comes from paying attention when everything you’re paying attention to is depressing. Not in a hopeless way, exactly, more like you’re watching a slow-motion disaster and everyone’s arguing about the best angle to film it from. The terrible news keeps coming and people keep having the same arguments about it, using the same talking points, performing the same outrage or the same dismissiveness, and nothing changes. Nothing ever changes. We just get better at talking about it. (Or so we think.)
Lately, I’ll have a thought about something I’m reading or observing, and instead of feeling that little spark of “oh, I should write about this,” I just feel heavy. Like the thought comes with this weight attached to it, and I look at it and think, “do I really want to carry that around? do I really want to spend three hours turning this into an essay that a bunch of people will misread on purpose?” The cost-benefit analysis just isn’t adding up right now.
I know this sounds cynical—and maybe it is. But I also think there’s something honest in it. There’s something about recognizing that not every thought needs to become content and not every observation needs to be optimized into insight. Sometimes you can just look at the world and think, “this is fucked,” and leave it at that. You don’t have to figure out what it means or what we should do about it or how to make it useful. You can just let it be what it is.
But that’s hard when you’ve built a whole identity around being a person who processes things. Because if you’re not doing that, then what are you doing? If you’re not producing insights, then what’s the point of all this attention you’re paying?
I’ve been thinking about Simone Weil lately. She wrote about how attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity, and I wonder if what I’m feeling is the exhaustion of attention. Of paying attention to everything, all the time, and then feeling obligated to do something with that attention. To transform it into content, or insight, or something that… justifies the effort? But what if I don’t want to be generous right now? What if I just want to be tired and annoyed and sick of everything without having to make it mean something?
As I write this, I'm finding it to be both liberating and uncomfortable. Liberating because it means I don’t have to fix this or solve it or turn it into a framework, and uncomfortable because it goes against every instinct I’ve developed over the past few years. The instinct to build, systematize, help. But maybe that’s exactly the part of me that needs a break right now. Maybe I’ve been so focused on being useful that I’ve forgotten how to just exist without purpose.
I don’t have a neat conclusion for this… I’m still sitting with it. I still feel sick of everything and not quite sure what to do about it. Still asking myself if there’s a point to writing any of this down when the answer is probably no. But maybe the lack of a point is itself worth noting… I don’t know.
It’s somethin’…
—S
PS: This week’s free post is “The audience of none (part 2): what happens when you actually stop performing,” in case you missed it. (Free to read through 12/21) x
Last night I had this exact thought. ‘I’m fed up of discourse.’ Of us all stating our opinions all the time, reacting to current events in a perpetual cycle, with it only rarely culminating in substantial change. It is something new every week, and I can’t even remember what “the thing” that people were talking about was just a couple of weeks ago. It is really exhausting - no wonder you’re feeling heavy and numb to it all. I think it’s great that you write honestly about it. At times I feel the same. Our bodies just aren’t designed to live like this, to always be on. I hope that taking a break from it all helps you to feel more grounded
The tiranny of having to process every observation into content. I enjoyed reading this piece while avoiding my own observations.