When the World Stops Making Sense (and the Heart Refuses to Go Numb)

I haven’t written for a month.

That’s not a marketing tactic or a creative hiatus. It’s because I’ve been shocked to my core by the state of the world.

The murder of Iryna Zarutska in New York City on August 22nd. The assassination of Charlie Kirk in Orem, Utah on September 10th.

Two moments that felt like the universe slammed its fist down on the table and shouted, “Wake the f up.”

I’ve lived through my fair share of madness… wars waged in the name of freedom, pandemics drenched in deception, and corporations bereft of integrity who seek to capitalise on all of the above. But this… this felt different. This felt like a collective spiritual stroke the kind where reason, compassion, and basic human decency seize up at the same time.

So, I stopped.

Stopped writing.

Stopped pretending I had something profound to say when all I could taste was disbelief.

You see, silence sometimes gets a bad rap. Occasionally, we think silence means retreat, weakness, or spiritual bypassing. But sometimes silence is what happens when your soul refuses to participate in the collective tragic theatre for a minute, or a month. Sometimes it’s the most honest thing you can do.

I didn’t want to add more noise to a world drowning in it.

I wanted to feel again. Properly. Without filters, hashtags, or algorithms deciding how that should look.

And what I felt was grief.

Grief not just for the dead, though God knows that’s heavy enough, but for the slow spiritual erosion that’s turning people into avatars of outrage.

Everyone’s right. Everyone’s righteous. And yet everyone’s lost.

When did “truth” become a weapon instead of a compassionate mirror?

When did we decide that being human meant being constantly armed with opinions instead of open hearts?

These events, these murders, these ruptures in our shared story. They are not random. They’re symptoms of something deeper. Something we’ve all been complicit in.

A civilisation that values being seen more than seeing.

A culture that rewards outrage over understanding.

A system that whispers, “Pick a side,” when the heart knows the only real side is love.

And I know — saying that word, love, in times like this can sound naïve, or worse, performative.

But I’m not talking about the vanilla, self-help love that’s afraid to bleed.

I’m talking about the kind of love that doesn’t flinch when the world goes mad. The kind that stands barefoot in the ashes and still whispers, “I will not choose hate or callous action.”

That kind of love is inconvenient. It’s feral. It asks you to stay open when every instinct tells you to armour up.

It doesn’t trend well.

It doesn’t fit into the meme economy.

But it’s the only thing that keeps the human heart from calcifying.

In these weeks of silence, I’ve realised that the greatest threat to humanity isn’t corruption or conspiracy — it’s numbness.

That quiet, creeping apathy that says, “It’s all too much, so I’ll just scroll.”

That fatigue that pretends cynicism is intelligence.

That seductive little voice that says, “Someone else will fix it.”

No, they won’t.

No one’s coming to fix this. Not the politicians. Not the priests. Not the influencers.

This isn’t about them. It’s about us.

It’s about you and me remembering what it means to stay awake — to feel the grief and the grace. To still create, love, and speak truth even when the world seems hell-bent on self-destruction.

I used to think awakening was all about bliss. The soft hum of enlightenment, the meditative glow, the gentle exhale after the breakthrough.

But lately I’ve realised… awakening feels like heartbreak and then feeling a new heartbeat and rhythm after the brokenness has been dealt with.

It’s the breaking open of everything false. The crumbling of illusions we’ve built to protect ourselves from reality.

And reality right now is raw.

It’s violent.

It’s absurd.

But underneath all that, there’s something interesting happening: a reckoning.

We’re being forced to look at what we’ve tolerated.

We’re being stripped of the luxury of indifference.

And if we dare to stay open through it… to keep our hearts beating, feeling, loving… then maybe, just maybe, something Divine is trying to be born through the chaos.

So, what do we do?

We start small.

We start being human.

We talk to each other like we’re not algorithms.

We love like there’s no tomorrow, because there might not be.

We create art.

We stop outsourcing our moral compass to people who profit from division.

We start being devastatingly kind — the kind of kindness that breaks cycles, not egos.

And when we can’t find the words… when grief or rage feels too thick to speak through… we breathe. We pray. We hold someone close. We let silence do what slogans never can: recalibrate the soul.

I don’t pretend to have the answers.

But I do know this: something sacred dies in us each time we stop caring.

And something wild and luminous is reborn every time we refuse to look away.

So yes, I’ve been quiet.

But silence isn’t surrender.

It’s strategy.

It’s where clarity is reborn.

It’s where I remember that beneath all this madness, my job — our job — is still the same: to keep the heart open.

To speak truth with love, even when the world doesn’t deserve it.

To build, to create, to feel, to care… when everyone else has gone numb.

Because that’s what real courage looks like now.

Not the loudness of opinion.

But the stillness of love.

And maybe that’s why I write.

Not to fix the world… but to remind you that your heart still works.

And that might just be enough to start again.

If this stirred something in you (if your own heart feels cracked open by the world right now) then share this message.

We’re not here to hide from the madness. We’re here to transform it.

With love,

Stephen James.