Tag: modern anxiety

Too much anger, too much fury, too much negativity, too much exploitation, maybe too much reality.
Whatever we choose to call it.

Sometimes, I want to shed this crust of anger and awareness, to feel as light as possible, even for a moment. To soften. To float. To rest.
But I cannot.

We are constantly encouraged to heal inward. To slow down. To withdraw from the daily rush. Hygge, the Danish philosophy of coziness and intentional comfort, or meditation, which teaches us to focus on a single point and quiet the noise, all promise relief. And for some, they work.

But I keep asking myself: what is the meaning of all this, if the magic disappears the moment you open your eyes?

I cannot unsee what is happening around the world. I am not extraordinary in any sense, just another ordinary someone among millions. And yet, I feel deeply empathetic toward others, while simultaneously constructing dystopian future scenarios for myself, shaped by everything I witness around me. Awareness, once acquired, does not politely step aside when you ask for peace.

Most of the time, I argue with myself.
“You are under too much stress,” I say. “You cannot even focus on meditation or any kind of hygge mindset. But what real change could you possibly bring to the table, even if stress became your core identity? Probably not much. What would change if you turned that anger inside out? Nothing, most likely.”

And yet, silencing it feels equally wrong.

I find myself trapped in a constant rollercoaster of dilemma. A dilemma between self-preservation and moral alertness. There is that well-known prayer: God, give me the strength to accept the things I cannot change. Some days, I tell myself to prioritize my health, to step away from the current agenda, to go with the flow. Other days, this feels hollow, as if deliberately unseeing, deliberately tolerating, is a quiet betrayal of my own conscience.

Lately, I have been wondering whether our obsession with escaping discomfort might be doing more harm than good. What if that persistent tightness in the chest, that boredom, that inner unrest is not a flaw to be corrected, but a signal to be interpreted? What if constantly soothing ourselves, numbing every sharp edge, slowly damages something more primitive in us, our survival instinct, our ability to sense when something is fundamentally wrong?

At the core, I believe boredom begins when something in your life needs to change. The dynamics shift, and boredom becomes the warning light. In that sense, it is not laziness or indifference, but information. And I am afraid of becoming careless toward such vital signals, afraid of mistaking anesthetization for healing.

Perhaps it is the over-exploiting nature of our time that makes focusing on inner peace feel almost unethical. Or perhaps we have internalized the long-term consequences of individualism for too long, confusing detachment with wisdom. I do not know.

Of course, there must be a balanced space somewhere in between, between collapsing under the weight of the world and pretending it does not exist. I have not found that place yet. But for now, this unresolved tension itself has become one of my resolutions for 2026: not to escape discomfort too quickly, not to romanticize it either, but to listen before I attempt to quiet it.

What I am searching for is not comfort, but my kind of hygge — one that can coexist with an awareness born from discomfort.
For now, I remain outside of it.

🎨 In the Hammock by Anders Zorn