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| Bay Window |
It’s so easy, to let
habit become fact. To let the algorithm dictate the energy flows. To settle
into the way things have always been, even if it no longer feels in balance.
That’s what the first half of this decade has been about. It’s easy for this to
happen, especially when you’ve been waxing and waning on the needs of
day-to-day—emails that breed like rabbits, the endless two-factor
authentications, the pressure to “optimize” every waking hour. The bills in the
inbox, the dishes on the counter, the laundry in the machine, and still your
thoughts gravitate to alone-time, a commodity in critically short supply.
When it takes all, to
not scream with weariness—the kind that’s seeped into your marrow, the kind
that nine out of ten workers now report feeling, drained by unclear priorities
and the relentless pace of change. Burnout has become the background radiation
of modern life, up 65% year-over-year, a quiet epidemic.
Too much happened. I
fell in and out of love in several layers—with people, with ideas of myself,
with the very concept of productivity. I wrote and published a book and working
on a new one. It’s endless edits. Nirvaan will be soon graduating high school,
and every morning I break my heart seeing my once tiny baby now almost a young adult,
findmy the only digital tether that
soothes and suffocates in equal measure.
I am making some bold
moves—deliberately choosing the “analog” in an increasingly digital world. I
chastised myself on every other occasion for not being “on” enough. I finally
caught fine lines, and an immense amount of grey, and a new kind of fatigue
that sleep doesn’t fix. Projects that felt like a metaphor for my own interior
life, everything torn apart before it could be put back together. Plans to meet
friends over business trips, and in the space of regimented schedules and pencilling
in dates, months in advance. Kept the painkillers industry going
single-handedly.
Thinking details.
Planning big. Rolling my thoughts around like pebbles in a box—only now the box
is also a notification center, a news feed, a to-do list that regenerates
itself. I threw them on the board and I still don’t see a pattern. Or a
picture. I feel like 60 and 16 at the same time. Shattered and resurrected by
the same things. The world makes me claustrophobic—with its AI-generated art
and its hustle-culture hangover—and I deliberately lose myself inside, lest I
forget to breathe, forget to feel, to listen.
But something is
shifting. You can feel it in the rise of JOMO—the joy of missing out—a quiet
revolution against the tyranny of FOMO. The 2026 zeitgeist is about refusing to
tolerate what drains us. It’s a mindset shift from achievement to alignment.
It’s in the young people ditching fluorescent-lit offices for the honest
fatigue of trade work, choosing “less stress, more stable” as their mantra.
It’s the rediscovery that rest isn’t a competition, and healing doesn’t need to
be a KPI.
It’s harder to bring
attention to breath and pulse and heart when the whole world is screaming for
your attention. But maybe that’s the only work that matters now.
The deep, tectonic
shift of something real. About to happen.
Copyright©Neer