You're fine. You got out of bed and made the meeting. It isn't depression — you'd know depression. It isn't anxiety, though it borrows anxiety's peripheral hum. It's more like weather. A low-pressure front that settles over everything and makes the air heavier than it should be.
You carry it without naming it. You assume everyone does. The assumption is correct, and also the reason nobody mentions it.
There's a term for the losses that don't get funerals. The death of a pet. The end of a friendship. A miscarriage. The quiet collapse of a future you'd assumed was yours. Losses that don't earn bereavement leave, don't fit the culturally sanctioned template. You know these. You've had several this year alone, probably, and you processed none of them fully because there was no space marked out for it — no ritual, no one handing you a casserole.
But here's what changed. That kind of uncounted grief used to be the exception. Now it's your baseline. A constant, low-frequency accumulation of losses arriving faster than you can metabolise them. You scroll for ten minutes and you hit a war, a wildfire, a species gone, a friend's divorce announced with careful euphemism, a celebrity death, and a meme about all of it. Your brain doesn't have a setting for this. It was never supposed to. People who consumed hours of media coverage after the Boston Marathon bombings carried higher acute stress than people who were actually at the bombing. Mediated tragedy, at sufficient volume, exceeds the direct kind. And you are consuming it every single day.
You remember when the pandemic ended. Or rather — you remember when everyone agreed to stop talking about it. You were grieving then, though no one called it that. Not just the dead. The loss of a future that had been quietly withdrawn. Then the cost-of-living crisis. Then another election cycle. Then the next thing. The window for processing each disaster shrank to almost nothing. Mourning needs slowness. What you got was relentless forward motion, each catastrophe acknowledged just long enough to be overtaken by the next. The news cycle is a conveyor belt at a sushi restaurant: the item passes, you either grab it or you don't, and either way the next one is already arriving.
You noticed something else, too. Your compassion started behaving strangely. One death still guts you. A thousand, you process abstractly. A million, not at all. This isn't a moral failure. It's a cognitive one — compassion doesn't scale, and your timeline knows it. On a feed, no action is available. Only the scroll. The perpetual next. Not a gesture of mourning but its permanent deferral.
After the Second World War, an entire country skipped the mourning. Germany threw itself into economic rebuilding rather than facing the psychic cost of what had happened. The unmourned grief surfaced anyway, as emotional coldness and a brittle prosperity that cracked under the slightest pressure. You are doing a version of this. You've redirected the grief into the curated performance of being fine. Nearly every culture before yours understood that grief needed a container — shiva, keening, the Day of the Dead, communal mourning with a beginning, middle, and end. You replaced those with three days of bereavement leave and a heart-react on a memorial post. The heart-react is the perfect symbol: it acknowledges the loss and closes the tab in a single gesture.
Someone asked how you were this morning. You said fine. You went to work.