When the World Feels Too Heavy

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by Dr. KD Farris: From time to time someone asks a question that isn’t really a question.

It’s more like a moment of recognition. Something in life suddenly becomes visible and the person realizes they are standing in the middle of a much larger reality than they had previously allowed themselves to see.

Lauren asked me one of those questions.

She had been at a child’s birthday party. The theme was Mermaid Under the Sea. And as she stood there she noticed the decorations and plastic tablecloths, the disposable plates and cups, the party favors, and everything made of the very materials that eventually end up in the ocean itself. It was darkly funny she said, “as if single-use plastic had vomited in a party room.” The irony of celebrating the ocean with the substances that are slowly killing it was not lost on her.

She wasn’t depressed when she said this. In fact, she made it clear that she was enjoying her life, her children, the ordinary goodness of her days. But there was another layer present at the same time. A kind of existential fatigue. The sense that once you begin to see the scale of what is happening in the world, it can feel almost impossible to know how to hold it.

And so the question emerges: What is the point?

When someone reaches that place, my first instinct is not to argue them out of it. The perception itself is not wrong. If anything, it is often a sign that a person has begun to see more clearly. What usually needs attention in that moment is grief.

Years ago, I encountered the work of Joanna Macy, an environmentalist and scholar who noticed something curious. Many people appeared indifferent to the destruction of the natural world. But when she looked more closely, she discovered that indifference was not really indifference at all. It was emotional shutdown. People cared so deeply that the scale of the loss was simply too much to metabolize. So, the mind did what the mind always does when something becomes overwhelming—it shut down and numbed itself.

In response, Macy began organizing grief workshops. Not activism meetings or strategy sessions, but simply spaces where people could feel what they were already feeling but had been holding back.

Her insight was disarmingly simple. The problem was not that people didn’t care. The problem was that they had not allowed themselves to grieve. Grief makes room.

When grief is not processed, it doesn’t disappear—it freezes. And when something freezes inside the emotional system, the world can start to feel meaningless. But what we are actually encountering in those moments is not meaninglessness. It is the protective effect of unprocessed grief.

Once grief is allowed to move, something reorganizes internally. The nervous system settles. The personality finds its footing again. And from that place people often find themselves naturally returning to their relationship with the world—not because the problems have been solved, but because they are no longer immobilized by them.

This leads to a second realization that many people eventually come to. None of us can fix the world.

At first that sentence can feel bleak. But over time it reveals itself as strangely liberating. The scale of the world is simply too vast. Social systems, environmental systems, political structures, historical forces. No individual life has the capacity to repair all of it.

But that does not mean our lives are irrelevant. Each of us must discover ourselves in relation to the world. You might think of it as your offering. Not in some grandiose sense, but in the quiet way a life touches what surrounds it. It might be raising children with awareness. It might be protecting land, teaching, healing, building, writing, creating, caring for community. It might be something much smaller and more private than any of those. But it will be yours, and it will come from you.

The point is not that it solves everything. The point is that it restores participation.

Once you recognize the scale of the world, you also have to recognize the scale of a human life. We cannot be everywhere and we cannot do everything. But we can know the place where our life meets the world and participate there.

The deeper task is quieter than that. It is to know what you are doing and live it fully. Your relationship to the world becomes visible through the living of your life, not through pushing others to adopt your conclusions.

At one point in my own life, I had the idea that I might try to remove oil products from my usage entirely. It was an earnest experiment. It didn’t last very long, though. Within a short time, I discovered that petroleum is woven into nearly every system we participate in—from the packaging in the grocery store to the tires on the car that takes you there.

What the experiment gave me was not purity but awareness, and over time, awareness became direction. The same can happen for you, not in spite of the failed endeavors to reach perfection but through them.

So, when someone asks me, “What’s the point?” my answer is not solely philosophical. It’s experiential.

First, allow yourself to grieve what you see. The grief is not emotional defeat; it is a necessity that reconnects us to life. And when you begin to move again, find your offering. Whether that’s organizing a community around something you love or saying a prayer every night for the outcome you want, even when it feels impossible.

I approach the challenge by seeing myself scooping buckets of water out of a leaking boat. The boat is leaking. Maybe it always has been. But as long as it isn’t completely sunk, there’s always a chance someone will come to save us. And in the meantime, I keep bailing. For me, that’s participation.

For further reading, I recommend Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work that Reconnects by Joanna Macy & Molly Brown.