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.

As the gender wars spike even further with the ‘male loneliness epidemic’ and the rise of red pill content, the rift between the men and the women of this generation feels almost irreparable.

When I first saw the article in Vogue, I focused less on the article itself, and more on the reactions to it. A lot of women felt validated in their decision not to date and in their single status, a lot of men were offended, and there was a good mix in the middle that just didn’t care.

Overall, the article seems to be adding fuel to an already growing fire online. But is this article just another form of ‘rage bait’ to attract attention and spark debate, or is there something deeper?

The article talks about the fear of getting the ‘evil eye’ from onlookers into relationships, a desire to maintain freedom, and a continued step away from the traditional happily-ever-after of marriage and family. There was also talk about a loss of ‘aura’ whilst in a relationship — I myself can relate to that one.

I think there’s no dispute that the dating world has become confused. More confused than it ever was (not that I was around to see it). I’m also not the first person to talk about it, nor will I be the last. So why is this? Why is dating so hard today? And will men and women ever find peace?

As we do move away from that stereotypical happily ever after, women are increasingly focusing on their own lives and ambitions, and the mask on the male gender starts to slip. As teenagers, a lot of us look at men with stars in our eyes, thinking they’ll be the solution to all our problems. Then we grow, and we start to see the socks left out on the floor, the dishes left in the sink, the emotional toll on our lives, and we start to think that maybe it’s actually a burden.

We’ve also grown seeing the stories of our parents, grandparents, maybe a parent’s friend — there’s always at least one relationship where you think, ‘Why are you still together?’

In movies, when the husbands were jokingly made fun of for not knowing how to cook or find their way around the store, I didn’t find that endearing. When a couple cheated and got back together — I didn’t think it was brave that they worked through their issues. With the exception of Mitch and Gail in Dawson’s Creek.

It was all just passed off as something to be expected. For women to hold the emotional burden of the relationship. To act, essentially, as a second mother. To put up with bad behaviour and let it go because of ‘love’ and expectation.

I’ve been the person in the relationship who has done everything for their partner, put myself on hold, cleaned, cooked, tried to be who they wanted so I’d be loved. What did I gain? A loss of identity and confusion over why the things I did weren’t enough.

Even in the relationships where I didn’t ‘over-give’ and I was loved, I still lost myself. Because although he wasn’t a bad person, I still carried the emotional weight of the relationship. I still found myself not receiving back the things I gave. And it’s not that he didn’t want to; he just didn’t even think about his actions or what he was giving me.

I felt that I just couldn’t grow in that relationship, there was nothing bad, it was just stagnant. There wasn’t room for me to really evolve. I felt myself putting my dreams and goals aside. Making myself smaller. As I’d seen so many other women do in my life. Why should that be the case?

It’s not that women don’t ever want love or partnership, but we shouldn’t just accept it in any form it comes.

Personally, I do want love. I do want partnership. But I want an adult that will support my dreams, my ambitions, inspire me, be able to function on his own, and have emotional intelligence.

As otherwise, what am I inviting into my life? I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Love on its own is never enough. And if I’m going to pick someone to be with for life, they can’t be a factor in making things worse, or even just be okay, but instead influence me positively in some way.

So, do I think having a boyfriend is embarrassing? No. I think having a bad boyfriend is embarrassing, and always has been. I think the dating scene is embarrassing. With all of the ghosting, cheating, non-committalness. I respect myself more than that.

But also, I think we need to remember that online isn’t necessarily real life, and things are a lot less worse than they appear to be on the internet. And I think it’s possible to be independent, achieve your dreams, and also have love. You just need to be a bit more intentional with who you choose.

Imagine a world where dreams are fulfilled, where passions are chased, and imagination leads…

One thing I admire about the human race is our ability to dream. We’re born dreamers, innovators, creators of worlds we know nothing about. There are no boundaries to what is and isn’t possible. As we grow, we’re instilled with the ‘reality’ of how things are, and the way things should be. Suddenly, walls are built around the things we believe we can do, and that little dreamer gets buried under the rubble. Still there, but kept far away, where they won’t cause trouble.

There’s a lyric in Billy Joels ‘Piano Man’ that hits me every time I hear it.

‘I’m sure I could be a movie star, if I could get out of this place.’

I feel his yearning, his wistfulness, his hopelessness. I ponder on how many people walk around with the pain of their broken dreams in their heart, of wishes unfulfilled, goals never reached. How many people are trapped in the confines of their situations, not seeing a way out, unable to pursue the things they love, but are adamant that they could do so much ‘If only things were different.’

I wonder how many people dismiss their hopes and passions, because they don’t see a world where it’s possible. Because they’ve been let down too many times. And each time, that light inside dims further and further, until it becomes just a distant memory, never to be touched. A secret harboured, of the life that could have been. And a fake resolution they tell themselves over and over to ease the heartache: ‘It just wasn’t meant for me.’

How many people do we pass by every day, not knowing that one person’s dream was to become a painter, one’s to become an actor, another’s to re-define life as we know it.

Where do they go? The essence of these hopes and dreams. Surely, they don’t just dissipate. They must live on within us still, needing only a spark to re-ignite that once burning flame. Just something small, to get the cogs of the imagination turning again, to re-think what is possible, to live outside of the boundaries placed on them.

I like to imagine a world where these dreamers are resurrected, where passions are fulfilled, and where in the same way we’re born dreamers, innovators, creators, we die as ones too.