A DAY OF „WELTSCHMERZ“ 🥲

WHEN IT APPEARS WITHOUT WARNING

Oct 10, 2025

I am struggling today… I am writing this not to burden anyone. I am writing this very personal post because I believe that we all have these days, these days of inexplicable Weltschmerz.

It arrives without an announcement — no dramatic storm, no particular reason. Just a slow heaviness, like the air itself has thickened. The coffee tastes the same, the to-do list looks as it always does, and yet the day carries a subtle ache. It’s not sadness exactly, and not despair either. It’s quieter than both, but heavier than either. A kind of moral gravity. A word exists for it, though it almost feels too elegant for something so unglamorous: Weltschmerz.

There is something ancient in that word — a German precision that refuses to dilute what the English language tries to oversimplify. World-pain. The sorrow of seeing the world as it is and feeling, in the marrow, that it could be better. It’s the ache of empathy meeting exhaustion, of conscience bumping against chaos. A sadness not born of personal loss, but of a form of collective fatigue.

I woke with it this morning. The kind of morning when the sky looks undecided, neither light nor dark, and the mind mirrors it perfectly. I tried to explain it to myself with logic — hormones, weather, lack of sleep, the news, the human condition — and yet none of these reasons seemed to fit entirely. Sometimes Weltschmerz doesn’t have a cause; it simply has a presence. It sits beside you at breakfast, stirs sugar into your tea, and sighs at headlines that feel like yesterday’s despair repackaged with better graphics.

We live in a time allergic to feelings that can’t be fixed. Sadness has become an inconvenience, an awkward guest we try to usher out before company arrives. We curate our emotions the way we curate our feeds: bright, composed, filtered. There’s a quiet shame in not being “fine.” And so, when Weltschmerz knocks, we do what we’ve been trained to do — we distract, we optimise, we explain it away. We treat it like a bug in the software instead of what it really is: a reminder that the heart still works.

Because that’s the thing about Weltschmerz — it is the tax of caring. You feel it because you notice things. Because injustice doesn’t roll off your back, because cruelty feels personal even when it isn’t aimed at you, because you have never learned the art of indifference. It is perhaps empathy’s hangover.

There’s also a strange loneliness to it. People rarely admit when they feel this kind of heaviness, partly because there is no tidy story to go with it. You cannot say, “I’m sad because…” when there is no because. It feels self-indulgent to say “the world hurts today.” And yet, who hasn’t felt that — that faint, existential bruise you can’t quite locate?

Maybe it is collective burnout. Maybe it’s the endless scroll of outrage, the absurd theatre of public opinion, the constant invitation to care about everything all at once. Maybe it is that every tragedy now arrives in high definition. You can’t sip your coffee without the algorithm serving you famine, fire, or cruelty in 30-second increments. The soul, I think, just wasn’t built for this level of exposure. There’s only so much pain you can metabolise before you start feeling it in your bones.

But the heaviness isn’t always triggered by catastrophe. Sometimes it’s the small, banal glimpses of disconnection that undo you: a couple sitting in silence at a café, each scrolling on separate screens; a child trying to get an adult’s attention while the adult types; a tree cut down to make space for something ugly that will age badly. You see these things, and for a moment the world feels heartbreakingly off-key — like someone has pressed the wrong note in the background music of existence.

And still, you go about your day. You answer emails, smile when required, and tell yourself it’s just one of those moods. But it hums under the surface, this quiet sorrow for everything that could be gentler, kinder, truer. It’s the kind of sadness that doesn’t really need fixing, only a little understanding.

We are told, of course, to focus on gratitude — to count our blessings, and to keep perspective. And we do, sincerely. Gratitude can soften the edges, but it cannot always dissolve the weight. Weltschmerz is not ingratitude; it’s grief for the gap between how things are and how they might be. To feel it isn’t weakness — it’s evidence of a moral compass that still points north.

Weltschmerz, I believe, has always existed. The Romantics wrote about it while gazing at mountains; philosophers debated it over brandy; artists painted it into the corners of their canvases. But today, it has become almost taboo. To admit to world-weariness sounds cynical, unproductive, or politically incorrect. We’ve mistaken numbness for strength, as if detachment were the cure for despair. But perhaps numbness is just despair wearing nicer shoes.

There is, however, a quiet nobility in letting yourself feel it — without dramatising it, without rushing to silence it. To say, simply: the world feels heavy today. To let that sentence exist without apology. There is some grace in that honesty. Because Weltschmerz isn’t a problem to solve; it’s an acknowledgment of sensitivity in a time that rewards speed over depth.

Sometimes, I think, the soul just gets tired. Not broken, not lost — just weary from holding too much. And maybe the kindest thing we can do on those days is not to fight it. Sit with it. Make tea for it. Let it speak until it grows quiet on its own.

Because it always does - eventually. That’s the mercy of it. The fog lifts. The world, still flawed, becomes bearable again. You look out the window, notice the small kindnesses — a neighbour helping another with groceries, a stray laugh in the street, sunlight landing stubbornly on the dullest building — and you remember that the same sensitivity that makes you ache also makes you see beauty others might miss.

And maybe that’s the hidden gift of Weltschmerz. It’s the shadow cast by compassion, the cost of having a heart awake to both the pain and the glorious poetry of being alive.

So yes, today is a day of Weltschmerz for me. Tomorrow might be better. But for now, I’m letting it sit beside me — quiet, unwelcome, and oddly dignified — because pretending it isn’t there would be a betrayal of the very thing that makes life worth feeling in the first place.

The Stigma of Sadness

We live in an age that worships happiness with the fervour of a religion and treats sadness like a scandal. The modern gospel says: smile, manifest, think positive, raise your vibration. We are encouraged to curate our lives into highlight reels of perpetual contentment — as if joy were proof of enlightenment and melancholy an embarrassing moral failure.

It’s no wonder so many people hide their sadness like a guilty secret. We’ve turned emotional honesty into bad manners. You can complain about your Wi-Fi, but not about your soul. You can say you’re tired, but not empty. You can share your morning smoothie, but not your midnight thoughts. Sadness has become the one emotion that doesn’t photograph well.

I’ve lost count of the number of times someone has said, “Don’t be sad,” as though it were an instruction I’d somehow forgotten to follow. As if sadness were a faulty switch you could flick off with enough willpower. But sadness isn’t a mistake — it’s a message. A weather system moving through the psyche. Sometimes it announces itself as grief, sometimes as nostalgia, and sometimes as that unnameable heaviness the Germans, in their beautiful bluntness, called Weltschmerz.

Yet still, we feel the need to hide it. The social choreography of “fine” is relentless. You say it on autopilot, like a password to gain entry to polite society. “I’m fine, thanks.” Translation: I am not fine at all, but I’ve read the room and it’s not safe to be otherwise. We learn early that vulnerability makes people uncomfortable, that sadness disrupts the illusion of control, that silence is preferable to sincerity.

Even therapy culture, for all its progress, sometimes joins the chorus of fixing. We are told to “reframe,” to “shift our perspective,” to “look for the lesson.” These can help — but they also imply that sadness is an error to be corrected rather than an experience to be understood. Sometimes the lesson isn’t in reframing the sadness, but in letting it unfold without interference.

I often wonder when we decided that sadness needed a justification. It used to be a normal part of life, like the weather. People accepted that moods changed, days darkened, hearts ached. Now, the moment melancholy appears, we diagnose it, medicate it, or shame it into silence. We call it burnout, depression, low energy — anything but what it is: a human response to the overwhelming complexity of being alive.

What we’ve forgotten is that sadness has always been a teacher. It slows us down, softens the ego, and returns us to something real. It reminds us of what we love and what we’ve lost. It opens the window when the air has grown stale with self-satisfaction. But because sadness doesn’t sell products or generate content, we’ve exiled it to the margins, rebranding it as weakness.

There’s an entire economy built on our discomfort with sadness. Self-help industries thrive on promising permanent happiness, as if human emotion were a software upgrade we can purchase. “Think positive!” “Be your best self!” “Choose joy!” — slogans that sound suspiciously like instructions shouted over the sound of someone quietly breaking inside. The implication is always the same: if you’re sad, you’re doing life wrong.

But what if the opposite is true? What if sadness — this raw, unfiltered awareness of impermanence — is what keeps us awake to life? What if the occasional ache of Weltschmerz is the evidence that we haven’t become numb, that we still care deeply, foolishly, beautifully, about a world that keeps disappointing us and dazzling us in equal measure?

There’s a courage in feeling deeply in a culture addicted to numbing. It takes strength to sit with sadness without anaesthetising it with busyness, consumption, or irony. To resist the reflex of “I’m fine” and instead say, “Today, I’m not.” Not dramatically, not as confession, but as truth.

The irony is that the more we hide our sadness, the lonelier we become in it. We all pretend to be fine, surrounded by others who are pretending to be fine, and the collective result is a silent epidemic of quiet despair. Everyone is waiting for someone else to break the spell. When someone finally does — when they speak honestly, when they allow the crack to show — it’s like oxygen. The room exhales. Because suddenly, everyone else can too.

There’s an almost sacred relief in that honesty. In admitting that sometimes, despite our best efforts, despite gratitude lists and green smoothies, the heart simply feels heavy. That sometimes, our sadness doesn’t need a solution — it just needs a witness. Someone to say, “Yes, me too,” and mean it.

I think that is why writing about this matters. Because there is a kind of quiet rebellion in refusing to sanitise the human experience. Naming Weltschmerz out loud is not self-indulgence; it’s more like solidarity. It’s a reminder that we are not failing when we feel the weight of the world — we are participating in it.

Perhaps one day we’ll remember that sadness is not the opposite of happiness, but its shadow — that both belong to the same cycle of aliveness. Perhaps we will learn to hold each other’s heaviness without rushing to erase it. Perhaps we will learn to say, without shame, “Today, my soul is tired,” and trust that the world won’t turn away.

Until then, I’ll keep saying it here, in small, imperfect sentences: there are days when the world feels heavy, and it’s okay. There is no shame in carrying more than your share of sorrow. There is no failure in being human enough to feel it.

Because sometimes, the bravest thing you can do is simply tell the truth — even if that truth is, today, I am not fine.

The Empath’s Ache

There’s a peculiar kind of exhaustion that comes from feeling everything — not only your own emotions but the ambient weather of everyone else’s. It’s like having the emotional equivalent of sensitive skin; what others can brush off in passing leaves you raw for hours. You pick up the subtleties most people miss — the tremor in a friend’s voice, the slight hesitation before a smile, the invisible weight behind someone’s “I’m fine.” It’s a beautiful ability, this empathy. But on days of Weltschmerz, it can feel like a curse with good manners.

Empaths are the tuning forks of the world. We vibrate with every note, even the discordant ones. It’s not something you choose or learn; it’s a built-in frequency. You walk into a room and instantly sense the undercurrents: the unspoken tension, the unacknowledged grief, the faint hum of loneliness. You can tell who’s pretending and who’s barely holding it together. It’s a gift — but also a burden, because you can’t really switch it off.

There are days when being porous feels like an act of quiet bravery. You walk through the noise of the world without armour, letting it touch you, hoping to make some sense of it all. But there are also days, like this one, when every stimulus feels amplified — when a single news headline can splinter your calm, when a stranger’s sadness seeps under your skin and settles there like an echo. That’s when empathy becomes heavy. That’s when you realise that the weight you’re carrying isn’t all yours.

It’s not that you want to feel less. You just wish the world would be gentler, so there would be less to absorb. But the world, as it stands, is loud — full of suffering, injustice, cruelty dressed as entertainment. And if you’re built to feel, you can’t help but register it all. The cruelty isn’t abstract; it’s personal. It pierces. And so you find yourself grieving for people you’ve never met, places you’ve never been, lives that never even touched yours. You ache for humanity like it’s a relative you’ve lost track of.

The irony is that empaths are often the ones who appear the strongest. We smile, we listen, we hold space for others, and people mistake that for resilience. They don’t see that sometimes our stillness isn’t serenity — it’s the effort of containing an ocean. We learn early that our sensitivity makes others uncomfortable, so we translate it into usefulness: we help, we comfort, we fix. It’s easier to carry pain when you can turn it into care. But on the days when the world feels particularly fractured, even that strategy falters. You can’t mend everything. You can’t hold everyone. And the moment you try, the weight of all those invisible sorrows presses down until you can hardly breathe.

That’s the quiet tragedy of being an empath: you spend so much time translating pain into compassion that you often forget to leave any of that compassion for yourself. You listen until your ears ring with silence, soothe until your own nerves are threadbare. And when finally, inevitably, the exhaustion comes, you blame yourself for not being stronger — as if empathy were a sport and you’ve somehow fallen behind in training.

But Weltschmerz has a way of exposing the truth beneath all that performance. It’s the moment when the empath’s façade cracks and the rawness beneath shows itself. You realise that your sadness isn’t weakness; it’s evidence that your heart hasn’t calcified. You realise that all this feeling isn’t a flaw — it’s fidelity to life. To feel so much, even when it hurts, is to refuse the easy comfort of indifference.

To be open in a world that rewards numbness is an act of quiet rebellion. To keep your heart tender in times of cruelty is a form of resistance. It means you still believe — foolishly, stubbornly — that gentleness has power, that kindness still matters, that decency is not outdated.

Still, the empath’s ache needs care. It’s not sustainable to keep feeling without rest. There must be small rituals of return — solitude, silence, beauty, art — things that remind you that life isn’t only sorrow. For every tear you’ve absorbed, you need a laugh that’s yours alone. For every wound you’ve tended, you deserve a patch of peace. The world doesn’t get better because we suffer alongside it; it gets better because we stay intact enough to keep loving it.

And so, on days like this, I try to treat my sensitivity as something that needs shelter rather than shame. I let myself withdraw — not out of indifference, but out of reverence for how much it costs to care. I close the door, turn down the volume, and remember that the world won’t collapse if I stop holding it for a while. Empathy isn’t meant to be endurance; it’s meant to be connection. And connection, by its nature, needs both giving and resting.

Maybe that’s the true lesson of Weltschmerz for those who feel too deeply: you cannot heal the world by drowning in its sorrow. You can only illuminate small corners of it — with understanding, with kindness, with presence — and trust that it’s enough.

Because despite all the heaviness, there’s something profoundly human, even beautiful, in this ache. It means the heart is still awake. It means that somewhere beneath the fatigue, love is still winning its quiet battle against apathy.

And maybe that’s the only cure for Weltschmerz there’s ever been: not to feel less, but to remember why we feel at all.

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Acceptance Without Fixing

The hardest thing about Weltschmerz is the instinct to fix it. We feel the heaviness and immediately start looking for solutions — as if sadness were a leak to be patched or a software glitch to be updated. But some feelings don’t want resolution; they want recognition.

Acceptance, though, is rarely glamorous. It doesn’t sparkle like optimism or make for inspiring Instagram quotes. Acceptance is quieter, slower, and far more courageous. It’s the act of sitting still while the world spins a little crookedly and saying, “Alright then. I’ll stay.”

We are a generation conditioned to escape discomfort. There’s always a podcast to distract us, a meditation app to reframe us, a pill to smooth the edges, a glass of wine to blur the lines. We’ve built entire industries around the promise that you never have to feel pain for long. But the irony is that by running from discomfort, we extend it. Feelings don’t dissolve just because we ignore them; they linger, patient and stubborn, waiting for acknowledgment.

Acceptance doesn’t mean surrendering to despair. It’s not waving a white flag to sadness. It’s saying: I see you. You’re here. And I don’t have to fight you. That small shift in attitude changes everything. Because when you stop resisting, you stop feeding the emotion with tension. You give it space to breathe, and in that space, it begins to move.

It’s strange how feelings behave like weather systems: they pass more quickly when you stop chasing them away. You don’t stand outside in the rain screaming at the sky to stop. You find shelter. You wait. You trust that the sun will return because it always has. Acceptance is that same kind of quiet trust — the faith that heaviness is not permanent, only passing through.

On days of Weltschmerz, acceptance looks like small acts of gentleness. It’s making tea without demanding productivity from yourself. It’s leaving the bed unmade without calling it laziness. It’s letting the silence stretch instead of drowning it in noise. It’s walking without a destination, cooking something simple, lighting a candle for no reason at all. It’s remembering that being alive doesn’t always have to be impressive — sometimes it’s enough to simply endure with grace.

When you practice this kind of soft acceptance, something subtle shifts inside you. The heaviness remains, but it becomes less hostile. It’s no longer a problem to fix but a companion to understand. You begin to see that sadness, when allowed to exist, has a rhythm of its own — a rise and fall, a tide that takes and gives back. It deepens you in ways joy never could.

Acceptance also requires humility — the kind that acknowledges you can’t control everything. The weather will turn, people will leave, systems will fail, the world will keep disappointing you. To live is to coexist with imperfection. But in that coexistence lies a certain liberation: the permission to stop demanding constant harmony from life, and to start finding beauty in its dissonance.

There is a quiet dignity in letting things be. It’s not apathy — it’s clarity. It’s knowing the difference between what can be changed and what must be carried. It’s choosing to stop turning pain into performance. When you stop dramatising the sadness, it loses its sharpness and becomes something else entirely — a soft background hum that reminds you of your own aliveness.

We tend to believe that acceptance means giving up on improvement, but maybe it’s the foundation of true growth. You can’t heal what you won’t acknowledge. You can’t outgrow what you refuse to face. Acceptance isn’t the end of the process; it’s the beginning of peace.

I sometimes think of it as sitting beside a sleeping animal — this heaviness, this Weltschmerz. You don’t wake it, don’t analyse it, don’t run from it. You simply keep it company until it stirs and wanders off on its own. There’s no victory moment, no trumpet announcing your emotional mastery. Just a quiet easing — the world looking a little less sharp around the edges, your heart beating a little steadier.

And when that happens — when the fog lifts not because you forced it but because you waited — there’s a sense of quiet triumph. Not the loud, celebratory kind, but the kind that whispers, I stayed. I didn’t run from myself.

In a world obsessed with fixing, that is almost an act of rebellion. To sit in your sadness without shame is to reclaim your humanity. It’s saying, “I will not perform joy for your comfort. I will not apologise for feeling deeply.” It’s trusting that life can hold both sorrow and serenity at once, and that one doesn’t cancel out the other.

Because maybe the point isn’t to fix Weltschmerz at all. Maybe the point is to learn to live alongside it — to let it season you rather than consume you. To let it make you softer, wiser, more compassionate. To understand that the ache is part of the architecture of the soul, and that without it, the structure would collapse into something flat and forgettable.

Acceptance doesn’t promise happiness. It promises wholeness. And wholeness, unlike happiness, can withstand the storm.

So when Weltschmerz visits again — as it will — perhaps the bravest thing we can do is offer it a chair, pour it some tea, and listen. Because buried in its silence is the oldest truth of all: the ache only exists because we care. And caring, even when it hurts, is still the most beautiful thing about being human.

🎶My Song for you

I thought this stunningly beautiful song would be perfect today: Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime - Korgis

For more good music, go to this Spotify playlist where you can find all the songs from the Change & Evolve Letters!

📚My Poem for you

Is by Mary Oliver (1935-2019)

Wild Geese

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.