I think this has been my least favorite season of Life On Earth™
Do you feel it too? The heaviness. The helplessness and heartbreak. The anger and cynicism. The last time I felt this way about the world was in the summer of 2021, when we collectively buckled under the might of the second wave of COVID. And I’m feeling it again.
I recently came across a word that helped me make sense of this anguish. It’s called weltschmerz, a German word from the 19th-century that combines the words “welt” (world) and “schmerz” (pain).
Side note: The German language has a knack for creating compound words that capture some very nuanced emotional or situational experiences. Der Kummerspeck is a blend of “kummer” (grief) and “speck” (bacon). Grief-bacon refers to our use of comfort food to cope with sadness. Then there’s Verschlimmbessern, combining “verschlimm” (to worsen) and “bessern” (improve). This term describes the paradoxical act of making a situation worse in an attempt to improve it. E.g. telling an angry, stressed out person to calm down.
Okay back to weltschmerz –
Weltschmerz means world-pain.
It’s that heavy, all-encompassing feeling of disillusionment when the world doesn’t meet our expectations on a macro level.
It’s the psychological bruise left by the collision between our hopes and harsh realities.
It’s the ache of carrying the world’s imperfections on your shoulders, while also being powerless to correct them.
It’s the emotional tax you pay for having ideals in a less-than-ideal world.
Joachim Whaley, a professor of German history at the University of Cambridge, explains it as “pain suffered simultaneously both in the world and at the state of the world, with the sense that the two are linked.”
Today, weltschmerz feels more like:
GOD when will all this end!!!!
It’s been a very uncomfortable journey for me to get to this point. Much of my worldview in the context of societal progress has been shaped by books like Factfulness by Hans Rosling, that tell me the world is in a much better state than most people think.
Rosling repeatedly highlights the fact that we tend to let fears and biases cloud our judgment, but if we instead use cool stuff like data and stats, the evidence tells us that quality of life indicators like health, education, and equity are improving globally.
I love that book because it’s like a refreshing reality check, encouraging us to see the world as it really is — full of problems, sure, but also full of progress.
Then, Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist with a hairstyle as memorable as his ideas, also wrote a great book called ‘Rationality’ that complements many of Hans Rosling’s ideas.
He points out an interesting idea: Our ethical expectations are progressing faster than the actual changes occurring in the world, which means we’re often upset by things that wouldn’t have upset us in the past. You’ll hear anyone that his lived through at least 5 or more wars echo this sentiment.
He talks about how we often fall victim to cognitive biases, emotional influences, and societal pressures, driving us to make crappy decisions on both individual and societal levels.
BUT ––
Even with knowing all this rationality and factfulness stuff, I can’t seem to access that mindset as easily these days. There is TOO much injustice, violence, and pain being inflicted on innocent people. My brain is too full of weltschmerz, or world-pain.
And I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. Our collective disillusionment has gained steam in the last two weeks, particularly as we bear witness to this prolonged, unbearable measures of human suffering.
It’s those darn mobile phones
Christian Nathler says, “The advent of social media and mobile phones has amplified our inclination to feel problems rather than think about them.”
Thanks to technology, we can hold all the world’s awfulness in the palm of our hands. The unending churn of bad news, the relentless sharing of propaganda, the ability to know what’s going wrong, like everything, everywhere all at once.
It has made weltschmerz a more immediate and invasive part of our lives.
Our scope of concern has broadened far, far beyond our backyard, but our ability to affect meaningful change remains frustratingly limited.
So, while Hans Rosling and Steven Pinker might be somewhat correct – maybe the world IS getting better, maybe violence and injustice in general around the world HAS decreased – it doesn’t matter that much because we can see further now. We can pinpoint and zoom into suffering and injustices that do happen with painful precision and clarity.
The illusion of linear progress
We like to imagine that human society is on a perpetual march toward progress — that as time moves forward, so too does our collective well-being, our technologies, and our moral compass. We’d like to believe we’re constantly crawling ahead toward a utopian ideal.
But we aren’t. This perspective completely falls apart under scrutiny.
It’s not just oversimplified, it’s also dangerously naive. It overlooks the setbacks, the upheavals, and the inevitable shitty journey of human advancement.
I like to call this mindset current year-ism. If you’ve ever found yourself thinking – Seriously? This? In 2023?!! That’s what current year-ism looks like.
It’s the belief that we are naturally more advanced or enlightened simply because we exist today, because we’ve been through what we’ve been through. Because we know what we know.
History, however, gives us a very different story: progress is messy. It ebbs and flows. It looks like taking two steps forward and one, or two, or ten steps back.
Take, for example, the Roman Empire, the one that men can’t stop thinking about. It gave the world advanced systems of law, governance, engineering, and culture. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it did fall within one, metaphorically speaking.
And when it did, Europe plunged into a period of stagnation known as the Dark Ages. After that, there was literally an entire phase in history called The Age of Enlightenment that led to remarkable strides in human thought and governance, pushing the boundaries of democracy, human rights, and scientific discovery.
These advancements, however, were soon followed by the crazy period of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, which demonstrated the destructive power of political ideals when taken to extremes.
Okay forget the distant past ––
Even in the 20th century, the technological marvels and advancements in civil rights were counterbalanced by two devastating World Wars and the existential threat of nuclear annihilation.
And more recently, cultural movements like the rise of postmodernism have offered new lenses for critiquing and understanding our world. While this can be enriching, it also has a huge downside. Specifically, postmodernism often questions the idea of a single “truth,” suggesting that what’s true can vary from person to person. This has led to a form of relativism, where it becomes challenging to agree on basic facts or shared societal values. As a result, we’ve found ourselves in this dystopian post-truth era.
You might find two people interpreting the same event in radically different ways, each citing their own set of “facts” or experts. This division makes it increasingly difficult to have a meaningful discussion or reach any kind of consensus, affecting everything from politics to science.
So if linear progress is an illusion and we’re all feeling the heaviness of world-pain, what then?
What can we do in the face of an ever-present weltschmerz? We can’t turn it off, change the channel, take a break, or look away – I feel like we risk losing our sense of responsibility towards humanity by doing that.
Maybe one option is to embrace the pain, not as a form of resignation, but as a reminder of our continuous obligation to advocate for a better world. World-pain can be like a motivational counterweight to apathy, pushing us to act even when the world disappoints us.
We can then strive for improvement with both our feet on the ground, aware that the path toward a better future is not a straight line, but a complex journey with its share of setbacks and triumphs.
But none of this motivational mindset nonsense is really working for me right now. I still feel helpless. I still feel a deep-seated, unresolvable sadness that speaks to both my personal limitations, and the limitations of our world.
Our very capacity to hold these contradictions — that things can be both better and worse, that progress can coexist with immense failure — makes our current world-pain all the more painful. It gives you a glimmer of hope, and then snatches it away.
It’s the existential bind of being aware yet ineffectual, of being a spectator to our own frustrations, and a bystander in a world where good intentions and high hopes collide with grim realities. This isn’t the plot twist we asked for, but it’s the one we’ve got.
I wish I could end this essay on a note of optimism like I usually do.
I don’t want to be weighed down by a world that so stubbornly refuses to meet me halfway! But that wouldn’t be true to the essence of weltschmerz.
And so we talk, we feel, we think, we act – in a universe that is largely ambivalent to all of it. This is the weight we carry, a sense of gravity that bears down on our hopes, on our ideals, and on our shared dreams for a better world.
It’s not about cynicism or capitulation, but about confronting the humbling limits of our own influence. In grappling with this truth, we find a strange, sorrowful kinship. A fellowship of souls wrestling with the same gnawing questions, the same dilemmas, the same gut-wrenching incongruities.
There is no tidy conclusion, no poetic justice. Just an ongoing, unresolved narrative that we all contribute to but can never quite control.
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