Look at the world with me.
What do you see in people?
I see people who are exhausted — but still here.
People who are still asking questions.
Still, somewhere beneath the weight of it all, wanting, hoping, praying for things to be different.
That wanting?
That’s not nothing.
That’s everything.
Yes, many feel like succumbing to despair. Throwing their hands up in the teeth of an unravelling world.
And I understand that.
I’ve failed so many times it’s almost comical sometimes. The world does seem rigged—rewarding the vicious, the reckless, the corrupt with obscene monetary fortunes, while those who work hard and play by the rules are left wondering what any of it means.
That’s real.
The systems around us have genuinely failed people. But to be failed by a broken system is not the same as being a failure.
Let that distinction land.
What predatory, brutalizing systems do is demoralize. Disorient. Make us feel small, lost, complicit. They want us scrolling, numbing, outsourcing our attention and choices to an algorithm and too bewildered to build. Up becomes down. Good and decent feels naive. And that is precisely the moment to refuse.
With intention.
The answer has always been the same, and it still is: take control of your life. I know how that can sound glib, even cruel, when so much feels out of everyone’s hands.
So let me be more precise.
Taking control doesn’t mean fixing the world tonight. It means turning toward it, rather than away. It means choosing, even in small ways, to build.
Build knowledge. Wisdom. Relationships that are real and solid. Love. A sense of purpose that belongs to you, not to whatever outrage the feed is serving today. Equanimity. Poise. A plan. From these things, quietly and steadily, a sense of power grows. And that power is yours.
No algorithm can optimize it away.
No corrupt system can repossess it.
We are, unmistakably, at a turning point in history. Shock after shock arriving like claps of thunder— economic instability, democratic backsliding, global disorder, whole categories of work disappearing. The world made a series of terrible choices, and we are living inside the consequences. Our disorientation is a reasonable response to unreasonable circumstances. We are not broken.
We are here.
We are sober.
We are powerful.
We are lucid.
But the lucidity has to lead somewhere. And where it leads, if we allow it, is back to our own lives — to the specific, irreplaceable thing we are doing here on earth.
Here is what I really want to say. When we give up, what we actually lose is our spark. That small, stubborn, almost embarrassing thing — the love of being alive, of caring about others, of hoping that what we do matters. It feels tiny. But it is in fact, the whole river. It’s what we have to give each other. And when enough people lose it, that is how a world goes dark.
Your spark is not gone. It’s hidden. That’s different.
So nurture it. Feed it the things that allow it hold: beauty, honesty, human connection, rest, meaning, the knowledge that we are not alone in this.
Let it guide us through the darkness — because the light is too.
Don’t give up.
The world needs your particular fire.
And more than you know, so do the rest of us.
With gratitude,
Dr. Paula
