What keeps us human when everything seems to pull us apart

This is a short, honest reflection on what keeps us human when everything seems to pull us apart. Perhaps you'll find a bit of yourself in it, too.

We build machines to connect us, then feel desperately alone. We chase freedom, only to find ourselves managed by invisible rules. We fill our lives with comforts, yet ache with a strange, unnamed emptiness.

This is the beautiful, heartbreaking mess of being human right now.
We’ve gotten very good at optimizing, haven’t we? We bio-hack our bodies, organize our anxieties into color-coded apps, and even brand our burnout as a form of personal growth. We are masters of the surface-level fix. Feeling powerless? There's a smoothie for that. Anxious? There’s a weighted blanket and a mindfulness subscription.

We treat our own unease like a software bug that needs patching, a technical problem to be solved with the right product or the right routine. But the ache isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

That feeling of being unmoored, of something being off even when everything is technically fine—that’s the soul trying to get our attention. It’s the whisper that reminds us we are not machines to be optimized. We are meant to be messy, inefficient, and profoundly, inconveniently alive. We are meant to break down, to feel lost, and to need each other in ways that can’t be scheduled or scaled.

The greatest trick we’ve played on ourselves is believing that our bubbles are the whole world.

In one bubble, the wifi is slow. The oat milk is sold out. The second vacation home needs a new roof. These are real frustrations, tiny cracks in a carefully constructed reality that remind us we are still vulnerable, still subject to the whims of the world.

In another bubble, a mother is telling her child to be brave as they cross a river in the dark, fleeing a danger we can only imagine. A father is working his body to the bone for a wage that will never be enough, his dreams for his children a fierce, burning hope in his chest.

What separates these worlds? Almost everything. The language, the landscape, the specific shape of the daily struggle.

What makes them the same? The love. The fear. The stubborn, irrational hope that tomorrow might be better. The desperate, universal prayer that our children will have it easier than we did.

This is what makes us human. Not our accomplishments, not our net worth, not the curated perfection of our online lives. It’s the raw, unfiltered stuff. It’s the quiet courage it takes to get out of bed on a hard day. It’s the lump in your throat when you see an act of unexpected kindness.

The most essential thing, in the end, isn't to solve the paradoxes of our time. It's to live inside them with an open heart. It’s to see the humanity in the person whose life looks nothing like yours, and to recognize the reflection of your own beautiful, terrifying, and fragile existence in their eyes.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.