I Think We Are Broken

It used to be that when you thought of a shiver, it represented the physical manifestation of the unknown, the inner beat of the relentless percussion of your heart, forcing its way outside your body, like the eruption of a volcano, to send you into spasms of either fear, cold or delight.

Now when I think of a shiver, it’s more closely aligned to trembles of frustration, desperation and hopelessness, as the bony, bloodless, grasping fingers of a generation in decline, wrap around our windpipes, to choke us of every joy, relief or opportunity to thrive and live in abundance.

Every day there is a new decision, a new restriction to batter knees that weren’t already bowed, at the back of the kneecaps with a vicious swing of warning to surrender to the pillaging of our sanities, our places of safety, and lives that offer more nourishment than to simply exist by a tattered thread. For so many people, the prospect of tomorrow doesn’t offer the illusion of deferred relief, or an opportunity to make good out of the bad, but merely another day to drown in a ceaseless onslaught of burdens, catastrophes, and/or feelings of inadequacy at not being able to show up in this world how they’d like to.

It is not this bleak for everyone. And the glaring disparity of this only fuels the worst characteristics of mankind; jealousy, envy and selfish ambition, with little care for the recipients of the collateral damage along the way. Karl Marx said "Religion is the opium of the people", but if he lived in 2025, perhaps he might come to a different conclusion.

We are now what we consume, and the social landscape is our religious text. The people who control it, we have inadvertently given free reign and access to our greatest fears, desires and flaws, and they have with utter delight harvested those formerly inner secrets, and turned us into raging addicts of the simulated worlds they have built, which nurse our worst fears about ourselves and each other.

Where initially these spaces fostered the beautiful parts of community for those unable to find it in their proximity, and connectivity for those living continents apart, each one inevitably descends into a chaos of pretence, enmity, projected envy, discontent, and a ceaseless screaming match of a billion voices all seeking to be heard the most. It’s created some of the biggest isolation & loneliness gaps we’ve ever seen, even while outwardly it appears to foster the opposite. The stench of brokenness is now impossible to separate from these places we have sought emotional refuge in, that have for so many betrayed the trust put in them to provide relief from the countless external triggers which were always waiting for them offline.

How do you defeat a foe like this, that has been curated, primed and refined over decades, for the sole purpose of directly targeting each of us? To send shivers of withdrawal down our spines each time we try to detach?

Deconstruction.

At any point we get to ask ourselves the questions that will shatter the broken worlds that have been created for us to dwell in. Questions like - Do I know who I am absent of the opinion of anyone else? Is my life still meaningful when there is no-one else to validate it as such? What am I looking for and is this the right place to seek it? What do I value the most in this life and does this space nourish that? What might I achieve if I spent less time in this space? Do I like how I show up in this world? Is wanting what others have and appears out of reach for me, increasing or decreasing my contentment? And so on and so forth.

It’s ugly work, because it will inevitably mean confronting internal cracks of brokenness, that cause us to seek so much solace in these places we know have altered the equilibrium of our wellbeing. Yet…it is necessary work. And just like a drug addict, as we wean off this opiate dethroning it from the highest altars within us, our minds may be afflicted by perhaps the worst kind of shivers; shivers that compound desperation, helplessness, anger, fear of the unknown & rejection, in a terrifying fireball of cravings for more self-deceit, illusions, and satiation of our basest instincts.

I used to think that “Eat, Pray, Love”, live-with-only-10-precious-items-in-a-tent-or-a-hut-somewhere people, were airy fairy, and far too “woo woo”. However, relentless exposure to the alternative has taught me that we are all on our personal journeys and at different levels, in our attachment or detachment from the things that produce the kind of shivers, that either send us free-falling into the abyss with numerable fears, or shooting like a rocket of excitement into the plains of Valhala.

I say all that to say this - I think we are broken, but I do not believe we are unfixable.

And as long as there is another day to live, it’s another chance to re-configure the template of our existence, into beings that have the ability to prioritise sending shivers of delight ricocheting enough in our real world, to repel every place that the prison of the shivers of despair & helplessness would seek to trap & subdue us.

We can do this.