Even When the World is Burning, We Still Have Water

The beginning of a new year is supposed to feel hopeful. For a moment, it almost does. Then, often within hours or days, the illusion fades. We open our phones and are met with real-time images of war, hunger, death, and genocide. The calendar changes, but global suffering carries on. Each headline arrives with numbers too large to fully comprehend and stories too human to ignore. Over time, this constant exposure leaves many of us disillusioned, with the sense that the world is burning and that we are powerless to stop it.

People have been calling 2026 “the new 2016.” The comparison is less about nostalgia for old memes, music, and aesthetics than about what that year represents. When the present feels bleak, nostalgia becomes a form of grief (Di Placido, 2026). That we are reminiscing about ten years ago at all reflects how exhausted we are from carrying the weight of the world to the point where even an imperfect past feels like relief.

Why does it feel like the world is on fire, and how are we supposed to stay human without losing ourselves in the process?

The World Feels Heavier Because We Carry More of It

As I scroll through my phone or open the news channel on my TV, I’m met with images and videos of pain from across the globe — people vlogging their homes as they are bombed, families torn apart by state systems acting under the guise of protection, bodies reduced to skin and bones from malnutrition, death counts rising by the day. Suffering has always existed; it is part of the human condition. But lately, it feels especially heavy. Perhaps things truly are getting worse. Or perhaps we are simply older now, more educated, more aware, and more exposed. The advancement of technology means that global suffering is no longer distant or abstract. It may be one factor or a combination of many, but regardless of the cause, the emotional toll is undeniable. In German, there is a word for this feeling: Weltschmerz, a deep grief for the state of the world.

The grief is not confined to distant places. On December 23, 2025, UTSC student Shivank Avasthi was killed in a shooting on our campus. I want to take a moment to acknowledge and remember his loss. Even close to home, tragedy persists.

It’s not new for people to feel like they’re living through the end of the world. Every generation tends to believe their moment in history is uniquely catastrophic. In psychology, this is called a negativity bias, which makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Our brains are wired to prioritize threats over neutral or positive information because, historically, missing danger carried far greater consequences than missing safety (Vaish et al., 2008). As a result, negative events feel louder and more memorable than positive ones, even when objective data suggests long-term progress in areas like life expectancy, literacy, and violence reduction.

What is new is the speed and scale at which negative information reaches us. With 24-hour news cycles and algorithm-driven social media feeds, our natural negativity bias is constantly activated. Psychologists describe this as the availability heuristic: the easier it is to recall an event, the more common we assume it is (The Decision Lab, 2026). When we go on our phones, we consume more information in a single day than our ancestors did in a lifetime. Instead of intentionally reading a newspaper once a week, a book chapter at a time, or a letter instead of a million texts, we absorb dozens of headlines and images at once, often without remembering what we read. There’s no time for reflection, and only a residue of urgency and stress. Research shows that exhaustion, not ignorance or indifference, is the strongest predictor of disengagement, as constant information and social demands quietly drain our nervous systems until even caring feels unsustainable (Cao & Sun, 2018).

Bearing Witness Without Self-Destruction

Understanding why the world feels unbearable is only part of the story. The harder question is how we bear witness without breaking. I feel others’ pain deeply; empathy is not something I can turn off, nor would I want to. But there is a line between empathy and self-destruction, and finding it is not easy.

Watching traumatic videos is positively correlated with secondary post-traumatic stress, which is the emotional distress experienced by trauma professionals after hearing the details of a traumatic event directly from the person victimized (Kennedy, 2022). Yet looking away can feel like a moral failure. Staying informed feels necessary to honour suffering and advocate for justice, but constant exposure can leave us emotionally paralyzed. One study found that people showed an increase in depression and anxiety symptoms after only 14 minutes of news consumption (Johnston & Davey, 2011). These symptoms are made worse when people feel they have no ability to improve the situations they are learning about.

Psychology describes our response to overwhelming threats as fight, flight, or freeze. Research shows that consuming negative news activates the body’s stress response, flooding us with hormones as though we are under immediate threat (Mental Health America, 2025). When exposure is constant and paired with helplessness, anxiety and depressive symptoms intensify, especially for those whose identities are directly implicated in the violence being reported. For Black communities, mental health worsens during weeks marked by racial violence (Mental Health America, 2025).

When the weight of the world becomes too heavy, some of us freeze. Messages go unanswered, articles remain half-read, thoughts unfinished. We care deeply, yet feel unable to act. Others choose flight, avoiding the news altogether. But disengagement is often a privilege, one that people directly affected by poverty or violence do not have. Fight can turn anger into action, but without rest, it ends in burnout, and burnout returns us to freezing.

As Silvy Khoucasian writes, “Empathy without boundaries is self-destruction.” When we absorb everyone else’s pain without protecting our own well-being, we lose the very capacity that allows us to care. Sometimes, in focusing so intensely on others’ suffering, we minimize our own, telling ourselves that someone else has it worse. But neglecting our mental health does not make us more compassionate. It makes us less able to show up at all.

We Were Never Built for This Much

Our brains were never built to process endless streams of emotionally charged information without rest. Attention functions like a limited resource. When we are forced to rapidly switch between tragedy, outrage, and distraction, that resource drains faster than it can recover. Research shows that emotionally intense content, especially perceived threats, hijacks our attention and makes it difficult to disengage, even after the stimulus is gone (Heim & Keil, 2017). Over time, this constant switching doesn’t make us more informed. It fragments our ability to process meaning at all.

This is why trying harder to stay informed often backfires. Negativity dominates politics because it captures attention (Poljak, 2024). Political actors gain visibility through conflict-driven rhetoric, even when it does not meaningfully serve the public. While this increases engagement, it also fuels anger, resentment, and polarization, creating a feedback loop where crises are amplified not to inform or mobilize, but simply to hold our attention.

Control sits at the center of our distress. Humans crave autonomy, yet global suffering constantly reminds us how little of it we truly have. This can even be seen in what economists call the lipstick effect: during times of crisis, people seek small comforts to regain a sense of control. Sales of items like lipstick rise not because they solve anything, but because, when we feel overwhelmed, even tiny purchases can offer a fleeting sense of agency.

Scholars who study ecological grief describe a related phenomenon called anthropocene horror, an ever-present sense of global threat that is not tied to one tragedy, but to all of them at once (Clark, 2020). Unlike grief, which mourns a specific loss, this kind of horror comes from realizing we are implicated in systems we cannot easily escape, making us feel powerless.

This may not be accidental. A capitalist system that prioritizes productivity and individual survival has little incentive to help us process collective pain. Instead, it benefits when we are overwhelmed, focused on ourselves, and emotionally drained. When empathy becomes too heavy to carry, turning away begins to feel like self-preservation. But that withdrawal comes at a cost. There is no clean line between “us” and “them.” We belong to the same humanity, and harm to one group inevitably touches us all, whether we feel it immediately or not.

Water in a Burning World

Even when the world is burning, we still hold water in our hands. Water looks like rest without guilt, boundaries around how much pain we consume, and choosing intentional action over emotional paralysis. Caring for ourselves is not abandoning the world. It is what allows us to keep being capable of caring for it.

Sometimes, we need a reminder that caring doesn’t mean carrying everything. The last time I visited my motherland, I witnessed something that stayed with me. Someone approached my family asking for financial help. My aunt immediately told my uncle to give him some change. My uncle hesitated and said, “We can’t help everyone in the world.” My aunt replied, “We can’t help everyone, but we can help the person in front of us.” 

We cannot carry everything, but we can carry something. And sometimes, offering water to ourselves, or to the person standing right in front of us, is more than enough to begin.

Sources

Bonadimani, A., Signori, P., & Tafuro, M. (2024, November 18). What is behind the lipstick effect? A study to explore consumers’ motivations for buying cosmetics in times of global crisis. IRIS. https://iris.univr.it/handle/11562/1145259

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Clark, T. (2020). Ecological grief and Anthropocene Horror. American Imago, 77(1), 61–80. https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2020.0003

The Decision Lab. (n.d.). Why do we tend to think that things that happened recently are more likely to happen again?. The Decision Lab. https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/availability-heuristic

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