We love intensity. We’ve been raised on it. News that screams apocalypse, relationships that must define us, and careers that are either calling or catastrophe. For us, everything is existential. Everything either has to ignite our sense of purpose or drag us into the dungeons of despair.
A bad boss isn’t just a bad boss anymore; they can trigger a full-blown crisis of self-worth.
A friend who doesn’t share our ideology must be a bad human being, no longer worthy of our friendship. A heartbreak becomes a referendum on whether love itself still exists.
Every piece of information, so cheaply and easily available, demands reflection on “the times we live in.” And somewhere inside all this drama, we forget how to live a normal, durable life, without the constant internal monologue of making sense or processing everything that happens around us.
When we call every discomfort a threat to our being, we lose the ability to respond proportionately. Anxiety replaces action. We start speaking in absolutes – always, never, ruined, saved because anything less feels shallow.
But life isn’t made of absolutes. It’s mostly small repairs: an apology, a new plan, a good night’s sleep. Calling every bruise a mortal wound doesn’t deepen our awareness; it flattens it. It strips us of nuance, and liveliness, and pushes us into an eternal state of victimhood, and nagging.
Maybe we learned this tone from history itself. We grew up among parents and grandparents who lived through real existential moments – partitions, wars, migrations, pandemics. Their survival stories became our emotional template: if you aren’t struggling for your life, are you even alive? So we dramatize the ordinary, mistaking adrenaline for meaning.
This is not to say that one must live in a bubble of false positivity or spiritually bypass the hard facts of life to avoid discomfort. But a mind that is perpetually trying to make sense of everything, determined to connect every dot, to build a grand theory of how and why will eventually burn itself out. In that exhaustion, it often makes the wrong assumptions. Such minds tend to over analyse, mistaking coincidence for pattern, or projecting personal pain onto larger, systemic or even existential frameworks. Such maniacal investigation into the outside world makes perfect sense if you are a researcher. But the internal world of human thoughts and emotions is a different terrain, where the same intensity becomes self-defeating, because emotional life needs stillness, not constant dissection or analysis of data points. It asks for deep relaxation that activates the parasympathetic nervous system to feel aligned, unthreatened, and at home. Calm is not just a spiritual state but a biological one. Preoccupation with existentialism, when left unchecked, often disturbs inner rhythm and drives it toward extremes -- nihilism, fatalism, or a kind of radical determinism that leaves no space for grace or spontaneity.
Spiritual maturity begins when you stop demanding that every experience redeem or destroy you. Try this experiment: the next time a crisis hits, whisper to yourself, this is inconvenient, not fatal. Notice how your body loosens. The mind starts to solve instead of spiraling. Perspective is a spiritual muscle; it grows each time we resist exaggeration.
After all, what’s the point of living if every moment of being alive is held hostage by anxiety and distrust, if our instinct is to interpret every uncertainty as evidence of a collapsing world, and to move through life as though we don’t quite belong here, constantly defending ourselves against a universe that feels indifferent at best and hostile at worst?
When life turns cruel, it’s tempting to watch the whole world burn. To mistake destruction for relief and chaos for catharsis. It feels easier to condemn everything than to stay tender within it. But there is a way out of this self-absorption. Courage, kindness, communion, and love, those luminous human capacities that make life worth living, are still at our disposal.
To reach them, though, we must first escape the maze of our own overthinking. A mind that is constantly analysing cannot inhabit intimacy; it observes life instead of participating in it. To love is to be simple, and to belong is to surrender the compulsion to solve everything, or to take a moral position on every passing conflict.
Maybe the way forward for our anxious generation is linguistic humility. Let “urgent” mean urgent not “the end of the world.” Let “I’m hurt” mean exactly that, not “I’ll never recover.” We don’t need more odes to meaninglessness or new elegies for the apocalypse.
We need presence, and community spaces that let us feel safe enough to stay.
Less performance, more warmth.
Less language, more listening.
Less philosophy, more touch.
To be a pilgrim is to walk, not sprint, toward meaning. The world will keep offering us new dooms, political, personal, planetary but we can choose to meet them without making them cosmic. Peace begins the moment we remember that most of life’s problems are simply problems. Not prophecies. Not punishments. Just the next stretch of road.
(The writer is a mental health and behavioural sciences columnist, conducts art therapy workshops and provides personality development sessions for young adults. She can be found @the_millennial_pilgrim on Instagram and Twitter)
