What the fuck is my heart breaking for

This morning I was watching videos from Dubai, abandoned pets left without food and water, and reading articles about grandparents calculating how much time they’ve lived, urging their adult children to take the only 2 flights left to go home. The kind of footage and news that makes your chest tighten before your brain can even process it.

Admittedly, I’m selfish with my consumption. I actually try to stay away from the news. I scroll past the extremes on both sides and cognitively distance myself from it all so I can live in a small pretend world where everything is okay because, in my immediate life, it mostly is.

At the same time my mom was on the phone telling me about people struggling without food or water, the way mothers do, not to lecture, but to gently remind you of the scale of the world.

There’s a particular kind of helpless heartbreak that comes from watching suffering from far away. You can feel it, but you can’t reach it. You scroll, pause, scroll again. You wonder if the video is real or AI rendered, which is its own new kind of moral confusion, and then you feel guilty even questioning it.

Moments like that instantly shift your internal dialogue into the familiar narrative: what do I have to complain about? Your burnout suddenly feels indulgent. Your heartbreak feels embarrassingly small. The exhaustion from work, the quiet loneliness of adulthood, the strange existential fatigue of modern life… all of it gets mentally downgraded to something trivial.

I start policing my own emotions. You’re tired? People are starving. You’re sad? People are losing their homes. You’re overwhelmed by work? Someone somewhere would be grateful just to have a job.

And intellectually, all of that is true. But emotional math doesn’t actually work that way. Human suffering isn’t a leaderboard. Someone else’s tragedy doesn’t cancel out the smaller fractures in your own life. And yet the comparison happens automatically like a reflex you learned somewhere along the way.

Then, a few minutes later, I get an email from my best friend. A ticket purchased for Burning Man in August. For anyone unfamiliar, Burning Man is essentially a week in the desert where people intentionally live with fewer resources, limited water, limited comfort, radical self-reliance as a kind of philosophical experiment in community and creativity. In other words: people voluntarily choosing to live with less food and water. And to be again admittedly honest, the first and only time I attended years ago— I loved it.

But it’s been years since that Burn. I’m different now. I’m more free in some ways, but also more caged in others. I stared at the email for a second and felt that strange mental whiplash that only modern life seems capable of producing.

Five minutes earlier I was watching people struggle for survival.
Now I was being invited to simulate scarcity as a cultural experience.

I’m very aware of how much privilege sits inside that contrast.

But the moment still left me with this odd, disorienting feeling like the world had split into overlapping realities that don’t fully acknowledge each other.

In one reality, people are fighting to survive.
In another, people are designing experiences about survival.
In another, thousands of us are sitting behind screens watching both.

Sometimes it feels like the entire planet is operating on parallel tracks that never quite intersect.

And maybe that’s why lately I’ve been thinking about my early twenties. I lived paycheck to paycheck then. My bank account was a rotating number somewhere between alarming and irresponsible. I shared apartments that were too small and drank coffee that was too cheap. But I remember laughing more easily.

Social media wasn’t constantly screaming at you yet. The internet still felt like a place you visited rather than a place that followed you everywhere. The news cycle moved slower. AI wasn’t producing entire realities faster than humans could verify them. People weren’t glued to their computers building agents to talk to other agents while humans watched the conversation like spectators at a digital zoo. Life felt smaller then… but also clearer.

You worried about rent.
You worried about relationships.
You worried about whether your friends would show up that night.

But you weren’t simultaneously holding the weight of the entire world in your pocket. Now every morning begins with a flood of information: war, floods, abandoned animals, political collapse, viral outrage, economic fear, technological acceleration. You wake up and immediately inherit the emotional backlog of the planet.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, between tragedy and privilege, between despair and absurdity, someone sends you a Burning Man ticket.

It’s hard to know how to process a world like this without occasionally feeling like we’re living inside some kind of simulation.

Not because the events aren’t real. But because the contrasts have become so extreme that our brains struggle to reconcile them. Or mine is, at least.

Maybe that’s the real condition of modern life. Not ignorance, and not apathy. Just the constant, dizzying awareness that multiple worlds are happening at the same time and we’re somehow expected to emotionally process all of them before breakfast.