“I feel like my soul wants to scream into a pillow.”

It seems that a lot of people are unhappy, discouraged, confused, depressed, anxious, worried, afraid, frustrated, angry, hopeless—and often multiples of these at once. The quote above appeared as a comment to a video by a Sheila Hammond titled, “I Don’t Know How to Be a Person Anymore.” Hammond is a feisty, middle-aged woman who is fed up with most of what constitutes careers, work life, the news cycle, and adulthood in general.

Hammond’s video is a firehose of frustration and despair, but leads to common sense and resolution, all with ironic humor. Here is a sample.

It’s like the world has decided to go full on apocalypse, and we’re just all expected to keep sipping our coffee and pretending that everything’s fine. Well, it’s not fine, and I refuse to continue gaslighting myself into believing otherwise. It feels impossible to move forward. This isn’t a Democrat thing and it’s not a Republican thing. This is a “people are exhausted and everything’s really stupid” thing. If you woke up thinking one more headline and I’m Googling how to become a lighthouse keeper with no internet—yeah, same here….

Seriously, can we just take a second and admit how bizarre it is that we’ve normalized existing in perpetual crisis mode? So yeah, this isn’t stress. This is a full body reaction to living in a system that’s allergic to stability and makes you feel crazy for noticing. Because that’s the absurdity, right? We’re supposed to fix structural collapse with skincare and gratitude. Light a candle. Make a vision board. Manifest your way out of a wage gap and panic disorder. And when that doesn’t work, don’t worry, there’s an app for that! For $12.99 a month it’ll send you affirmations like “You are enough!” while you scream into a reusable tote bag because eggs cost what your car payment used to be….

But I need to tell you, you’re allowed to set boundaries. You’re allowed to not consume every crisis as your personal responsibility. I stopped letting my mental health be the collateral damage for systems that were never designed to protect it. So yeah, I stopped watching the news. Big whoop. I started watching my capacity. I started noticing how much space I was giving to things that left me feeling hopeless and how little room I had for anything that actually helped me function….

Because here’s the thing they never tell you. You can care about the world and you can set boundaries with it. You can opt out of chaos without opting out of your values. You can disengage without being in denial. You can scream into the void and log off for a nap. It’s balance. It’s all about balance. Disconnecting isn’t apathy. It’s self-preservation. It’s admitting that we weren’t built to carry global trauma every waking second of the day….

We’re not doing okay. We’re improvising through a collapse. So, if you’ve been feeling like you’re quietly falling apart, if you’re tired of pretending you’re fine in a world that clearly isn’t, I want you to hear this. You’re having a normal reaction to an absurd situation. That’s not dysfunction, that’s sanity trying to stage a comeback. If you’re crying over cereal commercials, forgetting your own zip code, and zoning out mid-sentence like your brain is buffering, you are not broken. You’re responding like a normal person to a situation that is anything but.

In her videos, Sheila Hammond seems to have an uncanny ability to say what many are thinking but few are saying out loud. This one has nearly 3,000 comments, most reiterating the point Hammond is making, that the world seems to them to have gone insane. The quote I started with above summarizes most of the emotional responses to that experience.

I found Hammond’s video as I was following a string of recent postings expressing similar views. “We’re not doing okay,” as Hammond says. Another was darker but still provided a direction for finding sanity and purpose. It was called “Depression: The Only Sane Reaction to Modern Life,” by someone calling himself The Functional Melancholic (I didn’t find his real name). His perspective is very similar to Hammond’s.

You might not actually be depressed. You might just be perceptive. If you’re not at least mildly depressed in today’s world, I have questions. You’re either heavily medicated, deeply in denial, or you’ve joined some doomsday sex cult in the desert….

Modern depression is a con artist. It wears clean clothes. It does yoga. It makes jokes at dinner parties so no one notices that your soul has been hollowed out and basically rented to Amazon Web Services….

And if you do break down, you’re told to download an app to track your moods, drink more water, work smarter not harder, and cheer up because things could always be worse. You’re told to use positive affirmations like “I am whole. I am good enough. I’m smart enough.” …

To deal with modern insanity, he offers this back-to-basics approach.

Number one: stop pretending you’re okay and that this system is okay. Everyone’s pretending. That’s why we’re all miserable

Number two: do the bare minimum. Brush your teeth. Eat something with fiber. Touch something alive, even if it’s just your sad, neglected house plant named Frank (Hey, Frank). Find nature. Breathe clean air.

Number three: lower your standards. Not in a bad way; in a liberating way. Like, I wore pants. I only ate one bag of tortilla chips today. Victory.

Number four: quit the hustle cult. Your worth isn’t tied to your productivity. If you have a job and it doesn’t love you, stop giving it anniversary gifts and emotional labor.

Number five: find a person or a dog or a Reddit thread. Just connect with something that doesn’t want to sell you something.

Number six: practice radical acceptance. That’s the concept of acknowledging and embracing the present moment no matter how uncomfortable it may be. Don’t try to control it or force it. I think a great deal of suffering in our lives comes from our inability to just let go of so many things that don’t matter.

Number seven: it’s a cliche but it’s true. It’s the little things in life that actually bring any joy. A damn good cup of coffee. The smell of autumn leaves with the sun on your face. The purr of a cat who has trapped you by sitting on your lap.

In another short video clip, he says this, which could be summary of his longer video:

We built a world that claims to help us climb the pyramid. But in reality, it digs a hole under it and sells us the ladder. Our society isn’t broken; it was built this way…. You’re not failing. You’re functioning in a failing structure.

Finally, the world’s “failing structure” is the topic of a short video by a white-haired, Dutch woman named Mirjam Janse. She is a good instance of my no longer judging books by their cover. Janse describes herself as a “transformational coach and medium” and is attuned with the stars and our planet’s energies. Apart from that, however, she is also caring and compassionate, and a source of practical wisdom.

The title of her video invokes a well-regarded experience of classical Christian mysticism: “Dark Night of the Soul: Do Not Take It Personal.” Janse’s point is that our distress in this time is likely not about us, but about the state of the world. Recognizing that leads to following a very different strategy for coping and moving forward.

So, you could say, I have to go through the dark night of the soul to get to the other side, to get to the Light. But this [situation] is the whole world going through the dark night of the soul. And that’s big. That’s huge. But it also means that it’s very important not to take anything personal that’s happening….

Take a break and breathe well and get into action. When you keep moving at least the whole universe can move with you and place things in front of you that serve you in dealing with this stress.

“The whole world going through the dark night of the soul.” The was a mic-drop statement for me. This notion, originating with the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross, is that an experience of pain and loss is necessary before the discovery of our true self and our oneness with God. Seeing the world’s distress in these terms is both transformative and daunting. A Google AI summary of the experience makes the point.

The “dark night of the soul” is a term used to describe a period of profound emotional and spiritual hardship, often marked by despair, loneliness, and a sense of loss of meaning. Its purpose is to create space for transformation and growth by forcing individuals to confront their deepest fears and insecurities, ultimately leading to a deeper connection with their authentic selves and a renewed sense of purpose.

Is this what we are experiencing, not just on an individual basis, but as a civilization, as a planet? Is humanity itself beginning a transformation of its purpose and identity? Well, only time will tell. But putting our world’s distress in such a framework does give it a different value and suggests a different personal response and strategy.

Janse’s simple direction is to “keep moving.” The unending crises the other videos point to can easily leave us paralyzed. “There’s nothing I can do.” About those crises, probably not. But they are not our lives. They are not who we are.

Instead, as Jesus says, “You are the light of the world.” Whatever we do has the potential for shining light into the world’s darkness. By mutually shining our lights for one another, we share truth and hope that overcome the darkness around us, and we find St. Paul’s “peace that surpasses all understanding” which calms the chaos. This is what it means now to “love our neighbor as ourself”: to listen to our hearts, regardless of what the world is telling us, and do whatever we are moved to do that creates wholeness and nurtures life.

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