Weltschmerz: The feeling in the air right now

There's a feeling in the air right now. You've felt it, I'm sure. Maybe you've felt it in yourself. Maybe you've watched it move through a room, through a team, through a dinner table conversation. At first it’s an ordinary, normal chat. But then people open up, unravel, share. How they are really feeling. But it’s hard to explain.

I've been trying to name it.

That's the thing about this particular feeling, there doesn’t seem to be a label. Almost like there are no words, which makes it hard to talk about. And that in itself is part of the problem. We are quite good, as humans, at dealing with things we can name. Easy to explain. But this one keeps slipping, or feeling not quite right.

So let me try a few words on for size. This is where my curious brains goes searching. What exactly is going on?

The Germans give us Torschlusspanik, literally, the panic of the closing gate. The fear that time is running out, that a door is shutting, that you're not through it yet. That's close. There's something of that right now. A collective holding of breath. (Please publish my book in Germany and it can be renamed Five steps for navigating Torschlusspanik).

The Japanese give us karoshi, the concept of dying from overwork. YES - I know right? We are all feeling a bit karoshi. But also maybe not quite. Too extreme, perhaps. But its cousin, tsukare, might be closer: a bone-deep weariness that goes beyond a bad night's sleep. That's here too. The kind of tired that a weekend doesn't fix. I can feel your head nodding?

And then there's Zerrissenheit, another German word for being torn, pulled apart in opposing directions, internally fractured. You can see that in the rooms and spaces we're in. Some people are shouting. Some people have gone very, very quiet. Both are the same feeling, wearing different clothes. Both are a response to uncertainty, to pressure, to a world that keeps asking more while offering less.

But none of these are quite it on their own. And anyway, what if we do name it? What difference does that make? How does that help?

So that’s where Weltschmerz might come in.

What I think we are living in, collectively, right no, is Weltschmerz.

World-pain. Group-pain. The ache between how the world is and how we feel it should be. How it should be is not a shared vision, but the feel is shared. It isn't depression, exactly. It isn't burnout, exactly. It isn't anxiety, exactly, though it might contain all of those, the way a storm contains rain, wind, and the particular quality of light that makes you want to stay inside.

Weltschmerz is what happens when VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) never quite resolves or goes anywhere, and then BANI arrives. Brittle. Anxious. Nonlinear. Incomprehensible. (more about BANI and VUCA here) Not replacing the old uncertainty, but layering on top of it. We were already tired. Then the world got stranger still and even more unfamiliar. And we wondered where is all this going?

And so here we are. Exhausted, but unable to rest. We have to keep going. We have bills to pay. Showing up, but not quite showing up. Some of us performing fine, running on something that is definitely not fine. Some of us frozen at the gate. Some of us quietly disappearing from rooms, from decisions, from conversations, from the effort of having opinions. That might be a luxury, or it might not be a choice.

So what if we just receive this as data, insights, information?

The body, the nervous system, the soul, whichever you prefer, what ever works for you, is sending a signal. And that signal is worth pausing to read, before we reach for a solution, before we try to fix or push through or pivot. Or act. Or don’t act.

Because Weltschmerz doesn't need fixing. It needs witnessing, it needs observing and acknowledging.

So what do we do with it?

I don't think we fight it. I don't think we schedule it away or productivity-hack our way through it. I think, and I say this with full awareness of how countercultural it sounds right now, we might need to pause with it. Slow down our minds whicha re on overdrive. NOt because we’ve given up or stopped caring. But because we need to rest, recharge - reset.

Maybe not just individually, but collectively. To stop performing okayness at each other long enough to say: this is hard, and it's hard for all of us, and maybe that's worth naming before we do anything else. To say that with people who you dont agree with, or align with. That we are all tired. The noise and the silence in our rooms are not opposites. They're two people standing at the same gate, feeling the same thing, with no shared language for it.

Maybe the work begins there. Not with answers. Just with the willingness to sit in the question together for a moment.

The Germans, after all, also gave us Zwischenzustand - the state of being in between. Of not yet knowing. Of holding what was and what might be, simultaneously, without resolution.

Perhaps that's exactly where we are. And perhaps, for now, that's enough to know. That there are not simple solutions. But there could be collective support?

Playing with words, labelling how you feel, what you are observing can help you to put a definition, not to then sink into, but to then think about what it then offers.

It feels like we are all tired. But we can’t afford to be tired. So learning to pause, rest, recharge might be what we need?

What’s your thoughts? I’m sharing out loud because, well there aren’t beautiful prepared answers!