You can feel it before you can name it.
Countries pulling away from each other. Politicians grabbing whatever’s within reach. Rights that people spent whole lives winning, quietly put back on the table, or just taken off it altogether. Communities turned against themselves by the people who profit from the split. A genocide happening in front of us while leaders decide it’s somebody else’s problem. Or not a problem.
And the money. People are giving less. I don’t think it’s necessarily because they’ve got less to give - something in them has closed. When the news comes at you like this, caring starts to feel like a luxury.
I spend an unhealthy number of hours a week following it. Part of my job is listening to the stories of people in our community, and the other part is working out how whatever’s happening out there is going to land on them in here. We’ve all watched this get worse. I can’t point at the exact moment it turned. It was slow, and then it had momentum.
There’s a version of me that deals with all of it by shutting down, and I’d guess there’s a version of you that does too. It’s a reasonable response. Nobody can hold all of it at once.
But when the world starts caring less, that isn’t permission. Care more. Lead by example. Hold the line on the thing you said you were here to do, even while the ground under it moves.
I’m not writing this for CEOs. It isn’t a work article and I’ve no interest in dressing it up as one. I’m writing for changemakers - people who decided, at some point, that they wanted to leave this place slightly better than they found it.
The thing that has come up too often this year, and I heard it again this last week from Ed Sheeran. People saying they’re not political. That they don’t take sides. Stars, celebrities, people with enormous reach, all deciding the safest place to stand is nowhere at all.
I get the instinct. Taking a side costs you something real: an audience, a brand deal, a chunk of the people who used to like you. Saying nothing costs you nothing, apart from the one thing your voice was for.
Except not taking a side is taking a side. When people are being killed and you decline to comment, you’ve commented. Silence isn’t neutral ground. It’s a space somebody has already filled, and it’s being counted.
What gets me is watching people with power use it to make the voices of the dying quieter. Money defending the indefensible. And the careful, comfortable language people reach for to make all of this sound complicated. It isn’t complicated. It’s only costly.
So what do you do with the anger? Because it’s there, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
I used to hold onto mine.
Anger feels like fuel, and it feels like evidence you still care. But anger aimed at nothing in particular just burns the person carrying it. I’ve watched it hollow out people I admire, and I’ve felt it hollow me out.
Anger’s not the problem. Where you point it is.
So point it at something. Nothing grand, and nothing that needs you to be anyone other than who you are.
Say it out loud. In the room, to the people who already agree with you, and especially to the ones who don’t.
Pass on the thing you read, or saw, or can’t stop thinking about. That isn’t a small act.
Raise it in the community that doesn’t want to hear it. This one costs the most and matters the most.
Go and protest if you can get there. Stay at home if you can’t - there’s no shame in that and no less value in it.
Name what prejudice and hostility and hate do to actual people. Plainly, without softening it.
From your phone, your kitchen table, whatever you’ve got in front of you. The size of your platform was never the point.
None of it’s heroic. Most of it takes ten minutes. That’s rather the point. Nobody needs you to be extraordinary this week. Just not quiet.
I’m not writing this from a position of having it sorted. I need the reminder as much as anybody. There are mornings where the news wins and I close the tabs and sit with it.
I’ve also seen what happens when people hold their nerve. I’ve seen what a small group who refuse to stop caring can do for a community that’s been told, in a hundred quiet ways, that nobody’s coming.
You won’t fix any of this by the end of the month. That was never the offer. What you can do is refuse to let the temperature of the world set your own.
When the world cares less, care more. Someone has to, and you already decided it would be you.
Keep going.