The Cost of Our Malaise Part 1: Breaking the Autopilot

It’s with a deep sense of sadness that I find myself writing this, because something doesn’t feel right anymore. With us. With humanity.

We’ve become so estranged from one another that life itself feels less safe and joy-filled. Getting along...really getting along...now feels emotionally fraught, brittle, and exhausting. I keep trying to pinpoint the moment it tipped (COVID is a strong contender); when the manageable became overwhelming, and our usual coping mechanisms quietly failed us. Now, we are left flailing in a sea of uncertainty, each of us pretending we’re fine while sensing, deep down, that we are not.

Am I usually optimistic? One hundred percent. Am I questioning our collective fortitude right now? For damn sure.

What will it take to emerge from this chaotic mix of polarising circumstances? East vs. West, Left vs. Right, Man vs. Woman… the list of divisions is endless. My first inclination is prayer. My second is small, revolutionary acts.

Maybe it’s time we woke up and checked back in on life. Really checked in. We’ve been operating on automatic for too long, handing our power over to systems and algorithms that treat us like data points rather than souls. We chose convenience and comfort, but we forgot that those things are often the ultimate betrayal of the spirit.

We were raised on Hollywood projections and a McDonald’s idea of nourishment. We divested from our own autonomy willingly, trading our intuition for a "user-friendly" life...until the cost of our malaise became our humanity.

So, what do we do?

The answer isn't a louder platform or a shinier life. It’s smaller circles and truer stories. It is time to stop performing and start inhabiting our lives again...our real lives, rooted in time and geography, not on small screens. This is a call to re-evaluate where we stand as a collective, outside the influence of big tech and government.

The reset we’re longing for doesn’t begin "out there." It begins here: with a quiet prayer, a difficult conversation, and the radical, revolutionary act of choosing to be human again in the real world.

How do we begin?

To move from a feeling of malaise to a state of ownership, we must break the "automatic" loops we’ve fallen into. These small disruptions are designed to reconnect you to your life immediately:

The 5-Minute Witness: Reawaken your senses.

Sit in a public space (a park, a cafe, a bus stop) for five minutes without a phone, book, or headphones. Your only job is to notice three small details about the people or the environment around you that you would usually miss.

Identify one thing you usually do for "convenience"

Example, ordering an app-based meal, using the self-checkout, or using AI for self-reflection instead of sitting with your own thoughts. Today, choose the manual version. Walk, talk to the cashier, or cook. Sit with your feelings, good or bad; feel the "effort" and find pleasure in the doing.

Spend the first 30 minutes of your day without touching a screen.

No phone, no TV, no tablet. Wash your face, make coffee, or look out the window. Reclaim your morning from the "global feed."

Choose just one today and let’s reset how we live. Share in the comments how you are moving from autopilot to the driver’s seat. Let’s find ways together to reclaim ownership over our own lives.

Looking ahead...

Once we start reclaiming those small pockets of our day: those 30 minutes away from the screen or those five minutes on a park bench, something interesting happens. We start to notice the gap between who we are online and who we are when we’re just...us.

Later this week, I want to talk about the next step: dropping the act. We’ve spent years learning how to "post" our lives instead of living them, and it’s made us lonely in a way that’s hard to describe. I’ll be sharing some thoughts on how we can start telling truer stories to one another, the kind that don’t need a filter or a "like" to be valid. We’ll look at how to move past the performance and find our way back to real, unscripted conversation.

Until then, keep noticing the small things. I’ll see you back here in a few days.