Invisible Wounds: What 2025 Really Feels Like

If mental illness were visible, 2025 would look like a world of the morbidly obese.

Not in body—in damage. In weight. In the sheer mass of psychic bruises everyone is dragging around just to get through the day. If the real pain level of society showed up as physical injury, this year wouldn’t feel like a headache, or a pulled muscle. It would feel like one long, global childbirth. Contraction after contraction; no epidural; no rest; just wave after wave of “What the hell is happening to us?”

And the worst part: most of it is ambient. Background radiation.

I don’t have to be in a war zone to feel war. I just have to scroll.

In one hour on my phone, I can watch more violence, more hate, more humiliation than what used to be locked behind “restricted content” in a Hollywood movie twenty years ago. Torture, executions, beatings, suicides, animal cruelty, racial rage, domestic warfare—today, that’s not “shocking footage.” That’s… my algorithm.

We used to have to look for horror. Now horror looks for us.

Animal heat on aisle three

You can feel it anywhere normal life still pretends to function.

Go to McDonald’s. Sit on a holiday flight. Stand in line at the pharmacy. There’s a low-grade vibration in the room—like everyone’s running a fever and nobody’s naming it.

People don’t “disagree” anymore; they ignite.
They don’t get irritated; they go feral.

A minor delay in line turns into a screaming match.
A crying baby on a plane becomes grounds for public meltdown.
A misheard comment becomes a full-on character assassination.

It doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s layered: money stress, political fear, chronic pain, family collapse, unresolved trauma, sleep deprivation—and over all of that, the constant drip-feed of curated human misery from the screen.

We are not built to carry everyone’s worst five seconds, all day, every day, and still be gentle in the drive-thru.

Mental accomplices

Here’s the part nobody wants to admit:
Even when we’re not the perpetrator or the victim, we’re still in the blast radius.

I see a racist meltdown on video. I’m not in the room. I’m not the target. I’m not the attacker. But now I know about it. I’ve absorbed it. It lives in my head. And the next time I’m in a similar setting, that memory is sitting there, loaded and ready.

We’ve all become mental accomplices to things we never asked to witness.

We don’t just meet each other on streets, or in cafés, or at work anymore. We meet in the workings of our minds. In the shared junkyard of what we’ve all seen online. A stranger in Brazil, a kid in Ohio, a dad in Nairobi, someone on a ferry to Vancouver Island—we all now share the same archives of other people’s worst days.

We’re connected by shock.

There’s a cost for that.
You can’t keep pulling horror into your nervous system without something fraying.

The algorithm as priest

What’s new isn’t that human beings are cruel. We’ve always been cruel. What’s new is the distribution system.

Twenty years ago, some of what scrolls past me in a normal hour would have been locked behind a content warning, rated R, or held back as “too graphic for broadcast.”

Now a machine, tuned to “maximize engagement,” has quietly decided this is “recommended for you” material. The same way it recommends a cooking video or a cat clip, it recommends a beating, a bombing, a breakdown.

My trauma feed has a UX designer.

That’s insane.

The algorithm has accidentally become a kind of priest:

curating what we see
shaping what we fear
directing what we rage at
deciding which wounds get reopened today

Except this priest doesn’t care if we become better people. It only cares if we stay.

Obese with what can’t be seen

If mental illness were weight, we’d see the crisis immediately—bodies straining, collapsing, stuck in doorways, unable to move. But because our wounds are internal, we’ve learned to walk around like nothing’s wrong while dragging an invisible boulder behind us.

We’re obese with what can’t be seen:

Panic we call “being bad with people.”
Rage we call “having a short fuse.”
Numbness we call “just tired.”
Doom we call “realistic.”

Meanwhile, the cultural tone gets more acidic, more pornographic, more violently anti-everything, especially anti-God, anti-meaning, anti-restraint. It’s no longer enough to simply not believe; you have to spit on what others hold sacred to prove you’re modern.

We used to at least be able to appeal to some buried sense of God in the worst people. The old-school criminal who still tipped his hat in church. The thief who believed, on some level, he’d answer to something beyond the grave.

Now? The cops and robbers meet through masks—either in person or online—and nobody’s accountable to anything but their own dopamine and humiliation thresholds.

So where do we actually meet?

Underneath all the noise, you already said the truest line:

“We meet each other in the workings of our minds.”

We do.
In shared thought.
In shared fear.
In shared overload.

We’re afloat in the same psychic storm, and half the time, the only evidence we have that anyone else feels this way is the occasional raw sentence someone drops into the world saying:

“I’m not okay. This isn’t normal. This hurts.”

If you’re reading this and it sounds like your own thoughts, you’re not broken.
You’re reacting appropriately to an environment that has gone completely off the rails.

The madness isn’t you.
It’s the abnormal shit we’ve normalized.

And knowing that is the first honest weight-loss program for the soul.