Everything Felt Heavier Than It Should

What happens when you spend a day consuming the worst parts of the world

Nothing particularly bad happened today.
And yet, by the end of it, everything felt heavier than it should.

Today I had a duvet day. Not the kind that arrives easily, but the kind that has to be negotiated.

I spent the morning shoulding myself. You should write another chapter of your book. You should write another Substack piece. You should be doing admin work for the café. You should be productive.

And underneath that, something quieter but more insistent: if you’re not being productive, what exactly are you doing?

For the past five years, I’ve been living in high productivity mode. Building and running my cat café. Taking university courses. Becoming a certified neurodiverse professional. Writing a book. Being an artist. Being an entrepreneur. Always moving something forward.

So, the idea of doing nothing productive on a Sunday didn’t feel neutral. It felt off. Slightly uncomfortable, like I was stepping outside of something I had been conditioned into.

I tried to write. Writer’s block moved in almost immediately. I opened emails, skimmed a few, and felt my attention drift. I considered reading, which I still categorize as productive, because reading feeds writing. But instead, I found myself standing in front of the TV.

I paused there for a moment. There was a small resistance. A sense that I was about to do something indulgent, slightly wasteful.

Then I let it go.

Fine. It’s a duvet day.

A shower. Pajamas. Sofa. Duvet. No agenda.

My default viewing tends to be documentaries. Something that feels like learning, even when I’m resting.

First, I watched the BBC documentary America’s New Female Right, where a group of ultra-conservative women use social media to declare a kind of ideological war on feminism and equality. I watched it with the intention I usually have when consuming this kind of content: to understand how other people think.

But I didn’t spend much time thinking about how they think. Instead, I noticed my own reaction.

I found myself reacting before I’d even finished listening, forming arguments in my head and interrupting them internally. I wasn’t just responding to the ideas, but to the certainty with which they were delivered. Statements like women getting the right to vote has led to “degeneracy,” or the framing of the traditional wife as the ideal, with men providing safety and security and women remaining at home, raising children.

Part of me thought: if that’s what you want for your own life, that’s your choice. But why does that preference extend into something prescriptive for everyone else? Why does it require the removal of other women’s choices?

And then another thought, less certain: do they actually believe this, or is some of it shaped by the incentives of attention, followers, and monetization?

At some point, I realized I wasn’t trying to understand them anymore. I was trying to dismiss them.

When the documentary ended, I moved onto YouTube. An interview between Russell Brand and Piers Morgan I’d read about the day before. The dynamic was different. Less about answering questions, more about circling them. I found myself getting increasingly frustrated, listening to long responses that never quite landed on an answer. I noticed my mind shifting into analysis, reducing what I was watching to performance rather than engagement. At one point, I caught myself going further, telling myself I was watching narcissism play out in real time. I noticed my patience thinning.

I found myself flicking through the streaming apps, unable to land on anything that didn’t revolve around reality TV, true crime, or some version of conflict packaged as entertainment.

Then I turned on the news. More outrage, more noise, coverage that felt focused on holding attention rather than offering clarity. War, destruction, repeated without pause. And it was in that moment that I realized something.

I had spent the day saturating my mind. Not with anything untrue, but with a very specific slice of reality, repeated back-to-back without interruption or counterbalance. Ideological extremes. Ego. Conflict. Exploitation. Suffering.

And that was the point where I noticed the shift. It wasn’t one clear emotion. It was a mix of agitation and heaviness. My mind felt busy, but my body felt flat, as if I had taken in too much but none of it had anywhere to go.

The world felt distorted. Not just imperfect, but fundamentally broken, as though the worst aspects of human behavior were not just present, but dominant. Everything I’d watched began to bleed together until it no longer felt like separate events, but one continuous version of reality.

And somewhere in that accumulation, I found myself asking: is there actually any good left in the world?

Sitting there, it didn’t feel philosophical. It felt like something had been thrown off, like my sense of proportion had shifted without me noticing.

Because the issue wasn’t that what I’d watched was untrue.

It was that it was incomplete.

And repeated enough times, incompleteness starts to feel like the whole.

Reality itself hasn’t necessarily changed. My exposure to it has.

We are living in a time where the most extreme aspects of human behavior are amplified, not because they are the most representative, but because they are the most engaging. Outrage holds attention. Conflict spreads faster than nuance. Extremes are easier to package than ordinary decency.

Over time, what we consume begins to shape what we believe reality looks like. If our attention is consistently drawn to the most intense edges, those edges begin to feel like the center.

There is a difference between being informed and being saturated.

At some point, I realized that the world I was consuming did not match the world I was actually living in.

The world I consume is loud, polarized, and often cynical. It is filled with people at their worst or at their most performative.

The world I experience directly is not that.

It’s someone taking a little more care than they need to, without being asked.
It’s a familiar face staying a bit longer than necessary, not for the transaction, but for the interaction.
It’s a small, quiet moment where someone gives or helps without needing anyone else to notice.

These moments don’t announce themselves. They don’t compete with the scale or intensity of what we see on screens, and that is precisely why they are so easy to overlook.

The world contains both realities. The question is not which one exists, but which one we allow to define everything else.

What we pay attention to begins to feel like reality. And if our attention is constantly pulled toward the most extreme expressions of human behavior, our internal map of the world starts to skew. Not because those things aren’t real, but because they aren’t the whole.

That is where the exhaustion comes from, and where meaning begins to erode. Meaning depends, at least in part, on the belief that what you do matters, and that becomes harder to hold when the world feels overwhelmingly dark.

I don’t think the answer is pretending everything is fine. It isn’t.

But I also don’t think the answer is continuing to immerse ourselves in the loudest, most extreme representations of reality and calling that truth.

There is a recalibration that needs to happen. Not by ignoring what is difficult, but by recognizing that what we are shown is not the full picture.

The world is not just what is amplified. It is also what is lived quietly, daily, without spectacle, and that is the part we risk losing sight of.

And perhaps the only positive of a day like this, absorbing more than my mind was designed to hold, is that it made the imbalance visible and gave me a reason to write my way back out of it.