Unwrittn

Sometimes the scale of life hits me in stupidly ordinary moments. I’ll be scrolling through my phone in the morning, half-asleep, wrapped in the warmth of my duvet, and suddenly I’m witnessing three different realities at once. A bombing somewhere, a wedding somewhere else, someone making banana bread in a kitchen I’ll never step foot in. I haven’t even brushed my teeth yet, but I’ve already absorbed more emotional commotion than my ancestors would have encountered in a decade.

It makes me wonder whether humans were ever meant to live like this, with a world so large it’s at our fingertips from the moment we open our eyes.

Our minds evolved in small groups, a hundred people, maybe a hundred and fifty at most. But they were people you actually knew: their voices, their habits, the way they laughed, the way they got on your nerves. We weren’t built to carry the tragedies of millions, or to compare your life to thousands of strangers, or to process multiple global crises at the same time. Our nervous system was designed for the familiar, not the infinite.

I think about this mismatch a lot, the biological scale vs the modern one. Even when life is objectively fine, even when I’m safe, warm, fed, unthreatened, there’s this underlying sense of dread.

Sometimes it shows up as anxiety, sometimes as numbness, sometimes as a strange guilt, like when I’m showering and feeling bad about it, aware that somewhere someone has no clean water, and here I am deciding whether I should condition twice because my hair feels dry. It’s ridiculous and human and heartbreaking all at once.

It’s like my body doesn’t know the difference between danger in front of me and danger happening nine thousand miles away. My heart still races, my stomach still tightens, my thoughts start spiralling. Almost like a constant low-level state of threat with no clear enemy to confront. Just an on-going stream of information and no way to act on most of it.

I imagine in the past there was only scope for small, solvable problems: a broken tool, a sick relative, harsh winters. There was a world with clear edges, and you knew your role within it clearly. But now it’s like the edges of these worlds have started to bleed endlessly, and we keep on absorbing everything.

We meet hundreds of people online, we hear thousands of opinions, we carry emotional stories from strangers we’ll never meet.

But my actual life is tiny compared to the world I think I’m living in. I don’t experience eight billion people, I experience maybe ten deeply, my world is shaped by a handful of relationships. The things that genuinely affect me are the things I can touch, see, hold, change.

You can care about something without being responsible for fixing it. And you can acknowledge pain without trying to personally hold it. You can be informed without letting the weight of the world replace the weight of your own life.

The older I get, the more I think that peace isn’t about simplifying the world, but about simplifying your relationship to it. There’s power in deciding where your attention goes, clarity in choosing what belongs in your emotional world and what doesn’t. There’s freedom in living intentionally in a world that pressures you to be endlessly large.

We weren’t built to carry the whole world in our hands, but we canchoose the size of the world we actually engage with. We can choose what enters our minds, what stays in our hearts, what shapes our days. We can live lives that feel proportionate to our humanity rather than lives stretched to accommodate every crisis, and every expectation.

The world will always be too big, but we don’t have to feel lost within it.