How are we, really?

We ask it dozens of times a week. We receive it just as often, and almost always, the exchange is swift and scripted:

"How are you?"

"I'm fine, thanks."

A polite reflex, a social lubricant, a little performance of stability.

But if we let the question linger in the air: How are we, really? — it becomes something far more unsettling. It stops being small talk and turns into a mirror.

When I look into that mirror, as a person and as a therapist, I see a paradoxical picture.

We are living in a time of extraordinary technological advancement, of breakthroughs that just a generation ago belonged to science fiction. We can speak to machines that respond like humans. We can map genomes and edit DNA. We can live-stream revolutions from our pockets.

Yet, socially and politically, we are regressing. The rich are hoarding more wealth than at any time in modern history, while billions live with food insecurity. Wars multiply, authoritarianism rises, the democratic fabric in many nations is fraying. We are in the midst of a climate emergency that scientists warned us about decades ago, and still our response is piecemeal, politicised, delayed.

We have been propelled forward and dragged backwards at the same time, dizzyingly so.

Twenty Years of Permanent Crisis

The last two decades have been a relentless cascade of history-defining events:

• 2001–2011: Terror attacks that reshaped foreign policy, invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the so-called "War on Terror," and the slow-burning destabilisation it unleashed.
• 2008: The global financial crash — the largest economic shock since the Great Depression, followed by austerity measures that gutted public services.
• 2010s: The Arab Spring, mass migration crises, the Syrian civil war, and the rise of populist politics across continents.
• 2016–2020: Polarisation intensified. The Brexit vote, the Trump presidency, escalating culture wars.
• 2020–2022: A global pandemic that killed millions, fractured economies, and exposed deep inequalities in healthcare, housing, and work.
• 2020s–present: Climate extremes: record heatwaves, wildfires, floods, no longer warnings but lived realities. Wars multiply: the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the devastating conflict in Sudan, renewed and deadly violence in Israel and Gaza. The rapid rise of AI unsettles the future of work, creativity, and even human identity.

This is the historical weather we live in; a near-constant storm.

The Psychological Climate of 2025

The outer turbulence has an inner cost.

As a therapist, I see it every day: rising anxiety, depression, burnout. But beyond these diagnoses lies something harder to name — a collective shakiness, an existential vertigo.

Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer described human life as "a pendulum swinging between pain and boredom." Today, that pendulum is more like a metronome set to double speed, clicking between outrage and apathy, hope and despair.

We absorb headlines that would once have been unthinkable, and before we can digest them, the next crisis arrives. This is more than information overload, it's meaning overload. Our minds are forced to process events at a speed that far outpaces our emotional capacity.

Psychologist James Hillman spoke of "soul loss" — the gradual erosion of depth, of our capacity to engage with the world imaginatively. In 2025, soul loss is widespread. The relentless churn of events, the monetisation of attention, the daily invitation to compare our private messiness to others' curated perfection, all of it leaves us flattened, disoriented, and disconnected from our own interiority.

Denial as Survival

Given this climate, it's no wonder many of us turn to denial. We doom-scroll the headlines but skim the details. We joke about the end of the world. We compartmentalise, we focus on our own lives, our families, our work — anything more feels overwhelming.

This is not a moral failing. It is, as Joanna Macy reminds us, a survival strategy. If we allowed the full weight of the crises to land on us all at once, our nervous systems would buckle. Denial can be a breathing space, a way to regulate ourselves before we re-engage.

The danger is staying in denial indefinitely. Left unexamined, it becomes passivity, and passivity, as Naomi Klein warns, creates a perfect vacuum for the "shock doctrine" — where disoriented populations are more easily manipulated, and regressive agendas slip through without resistance.

The Seduction of Helplessness

Helplessness is seductive because it offers relief from responsibility. If nothing can be done, then we can stop trying. We can retreat into private concerns and avoid the risk of disappointment.

But there's a darker truth: helplessness is contagious. Once enough people decide the system is too broken to fix, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is where Émile Durkheim's concept of anomie comes alive, the breakdown of social bonds and shared purpose, leaving individuals adrift.

Connection in an Age of Disconnection

Papadopoulos, in his work on displacement, writes about the human need for belonging as a foundation of psychological health. And yet, we live in what should be the golden age of connection: hyperlinked, networked, instant, while loneliness statistics soar.

Our connection is often horizontal but shallow. We have more "contacts" than ever, but fewer people with whom we can be raw and unguarded. We scroll through hundreds of updates a day but rarely stop to ask, and mean it, "How are you, really?"

The paradox is that the same technologies that amplify superficial connection can also be tools for genuine solidarity, if we use them with intention. They allow us to witness injustice on the other side of the world and respond with direct action, fundraising, advocacy. We can build communities of care that transcend geography. The problem is not the tools themselves, but the way they are designed to monetise distraction.

Facing the Shadow Without Being Consumed by It

Carl Jung understood that transformation requires us to face the shadow — the parts of ourselves and our societies that we'd rather keep hidden. Avoiding the shadow keeps it powerful; bringing it into awareness allows for integration.

But staring into darkness without balance risks being swallowed by it. Roberto Assagioli's model of Psychosynthesis offers an antidote: alongside shadow work, we must cultivate connection to the higher self, the part of us that is creative, loving, purposeful. This is not bypassing pain; it's creating a counterweight to despair. Hillman's call for "soul-making" is, in this context, a form of resistance. Beauty, imagination, and meaning are not luxuries in dark times, they are lifelines.

The Radical Act of Hope

Stephen Hartmann frames hope not as wishful thinking, but as a deliberate stance: an active orientation towards the possible. In a cynical age, hope is radical because it insists on possibility despite the evidence of failure.

Hope is not guaranteed success. It is choosing to act as though what we do matters, precisely because we cannot know the outcome. It is planting trees whose shade we may never sit under, building communities we may not live to see flourish.

Being Human as Resistance

So how do we hold on to hope without falling into naivety?

By remembering and enacting what it means to be human. Being human is not merely a state of consciousness or intelligence; it is relational. It's about showing up for one another in tangible ways, about being willing to sit with discomfort, to hear pain without trying to fix it instantly, to extend kindness even when it's not "deserved."

It's also about saying no. No to dehumanising policies, no to manipulation, no to the erosion of truth. Boundaries are acts of care, both for ourselves and for the collective. It's about saying yes — to art, to laughter, to repair, to the stubborn joy of living fully in the face of collapsing narratives.

From Numbness to Engagement

Joanna Macy's "Work That Reconnects" maps a pathway from paralysis to action:

1. 1.Gratitude for what still sustains life — the air, the sun, the kindness of strangers.
2. 2.Honouring our pain for the world — letting ourselves feel it without drowning.
3. 3.Seeing with new eyes — understanding our deep interconnection and the agency we do have.
4. 4.Going forth — acting, even in small ways, to embody the world we want.

Small acts matter: a neighbour checked on, a protest joined, a conversation that shifts someone's thinking. Refusal to dehumanise those with whom we disagree. These micro-actions accumulate into something larger — they remind us that we are agents, not bystanders.

The Invitation of This Moment

It's tempting to believe our times are uniquely doomed. But history reminds us that every generation has faced upheaval that seemed insurmountable. Jung saw in crisis the seeds of transformation. Schopenhauer, despite his deep pessimism, held that compassion was humanity's highest virtue.

The invitation of 2025 is to live in the paradox: to acknowledge that yes, the crises are real and urgent, and yet, within and around them, human beings are still capable of breathtaking acts of care, creativity, and courage.

We don't get to choose the age we're born into. But we do get to choose how we inhabit it.

Let me return to the question — how are we, really?

We are hurting.

We are hopeful.

We are human.

And if we can stay human — truly, courageously human, then perhaps there is far more possibility ahead than we dare imagine.