Weltschmerz

The world is going to hell and I can't deal with it.

I still remember the first time I felt the weight of the world so acutely that it almost crushed me: I was twenty years old or something, staring at my bedroom ceiling at some ungodly hour of the night, imagining all the collapsing ecosystems, the injustices, and the endless grind of what some old, white, rich motherfuckers deemed “society.” At the time, I didn’t have the language for it. Well, it’s Weltschmerz. World-weariness. World-pain. A deep ache, a spiritual exhaustion at the state of existence.

And holy shit, that weight has only gotten heavier.

It’s to be expected: we live in a moment in history that feels like a slow-motion collapse, an unraveling of all that was once promised or at least envisioned. There’s the climate crisis we’ve engineered—this unstoppable wrecking ball of storms, floods, droughts, and relentless heat. There’s rampant wealth inequality that has transformed the Western Dream into a global nightmare, and a rise of far-right movements feeding off the scraps of humanity’s fear.

What do we even do with that? How do we exist in a world that seems bent on self-destruction, craves it, wants it, needs it, while we’re stuck playing our bullshit roles in the boring capitalist machine?

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The German Romantics’ word fits perfectly. I’ll repeat it: Weltschmerz. It’s not just sadness at a personal tragedy. It’s the sum total of your heartbreak for all that is wrong, twisted, and suffocating in the world. (And that’s a lot.) It’s a kind of existential grief that tugs at you whenever you dare to observe the bigger picture. “All this,” it seems to whisper, “is quite fucked.” That’s the essence of Weltschmerz.

Arthur Schopenhauer once said,

“Life is a constant process of dying.”

And he was onto something: each day we wake is another day to watch parts of ourselves, or of this planet, slip away. Forests burn for agricultural profit, ice caps melt to feed the insatiable thirst of convenience, species vanish in the tide of annihilation we call progress. Meanwhile, the talking heads on TV promise “economic growth,” as if that is the singular measure of a life well lived. Growth, expansion, never-ending hustle—like a python devouring its tail. Society is in the process of dying.

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I think about this world-weariness in the context of my own day-to-day dissociation.

Wake up. Check phone. Scroll through horrifying headlines about wildfires or floods or more dead children in some war zone, or yet another right-wing psychopath calling for some new form of domination. Get up, shower, shovel something down my throat, rush out to a job that feels like an endless treadmill of meaningless tasks—toss a few emails, hit a few metrics, rinse, repeat. Then I come home, exhausted, and what do I do? I pop on pirated movies and TV shows or scroll social media, fumbling for fleeting moments of synthetic comfort. Mmmm… synthetic comfort. Then I fall asleep, only to repeat it all again. The days blur. The tragedies accumulate.

Meanwhile, we feel the collapse clock ticking louder and louder, a doomsday countdown overshadowing it all. Boom, boom, boom.

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I remember reading The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus (my existentialist crush) and feeling an odd sense of relief. Sisyphus, forced to roll a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll back down, infinitely. Camus famously ends with,

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

But can we? The notion being that even in our absurd, cyclical struggles, we can find a rebellious spark of personal freedom in the acceptance of our fate. Embrace the futility. Maybe even smile at it.

But it’s not enough. Sometimes, you want to scream: “Why the fuck does it have to be this way?” And that’s the essence of Weltschmerz. You see the possibility of something better. You see glimpses of utopias—like non-capitalist universal basic income, or an egalitarian society free of hierarchical exploitation, or the dream that a benevolent AI could liberate us from endless drudgery.

Yet the distance between that dream and our current reality is so wide that it feels insurmountable. We’re stuck in this giant labyrinth of capitalist constraints, environmental collapse, and political (and societal) idiocy—and we can’t find the damn exit. (Is there one?)

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In The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Thomas Ligotti wrote,

“We are puppets, puppets whose strings are pulled by evolution, society, and our own subjective illusions.”

That sense of being manipulated by forces bigger than us, whether it’s natural selection or the demands of a consumerist society—that nails the feeling. We say we’re free, but step back and look: Are we free, or are we cogs in some monstrous Kafkaesque apparatus whose only real objective is to churn out profit for the few?

Every time I read about the lavish lifestyles of billionaires—private jets, superyachts, massive carbon footprints—I feel a rush of despair and anger. They get to wander the globe at will, while much of humanity can barely afford a single day off or a functioning healthcare system. They get to live. Why do they get to live?

You’d think that in an age of unstoppable climate catastrophes, we’d be using our immense technological abilities to build resilient systems, protect biodiversity, and equitably distribute resources. But instead, we’re still locked into a capitalist chess match where the only real rule is “accumulate more.” Meanwhile, the planet rots, climate refugees drown in the Mediterranean, genocides no longer worry anyone, and we politely wring our hands while continuing our daily routines like good little wage doggies.

That mismatch between what is and what could be can be soul-crushing. That’s where Weltschmerz hits. It’s not that I’m depressed in the clinical sense—though, yes, I’ve been there—but it’s more like a planetary gloom that seeps into every corner of consciousness. A heavy cloak of sorrow at the stupidity of it all.

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My favorite subject to bring up at family gatherings: then there’s the matter of rising fascism, the new wave of far-right bullshit preying on people’s fear, xenophobia, and frustration. Instead of addressing the real structural problems—rampant inequality, profit-driven ecocide—these movements scapegoat immigrants, the poor, and anyone on the margins. It’s horrifying, and it’s a big reason so many of us feel that old existential ache, reminding us of the fragility of any semblance of progress we’ve made. Capitalist democracy is shit. It really is. The darkest impulses of humanity never vanish (blah blah human nature, you are wrong); they just hide until times of crisis bring them back out into the open.

And here they are again. Hello!

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Weltschmerz is also personal. It’s tied to the daily heartbreak of feeling so small in the face of global meltdown, so powerless against armies of corporate lobbying, so outmatched by well-funded misinformation campaigns that keep entire populations docile. It’s that sense that even if you rally, even if you protest, even if you strike, your voice is nothing. And that is correct.

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Nietzsche famously said,

“If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

That’s precisely what a heavy dose of world news does, day in and day out. The repetitive cycle of wars, the unstoppable climate disruptions, the cynically orchestrated economic exploitation. You stare too long at it, and you start to feel the darkness seeping in. You become the darkness. It’s terrifying to think that the more we try to understand the monster, the more we internalize its monstrosity. Sometimes, ignorance or distraction seem like salvation. But that’s not an option for me, I fear. Maybe that’s part of my neurodivergent wiring—an inability to fully detach.

And so we circle back to Camus’s notion of the Absurd, that tension between our longing for meaning and the silent void that offers none. We want the world to be fair, but it isn’t. We want some cosmic justice, but it never arrives. We want, at absolute minimum, a planet that doesn’t tilt us into extinction. But guess what? We’re apparently on track to cross multiple planetary boundaries that sustain life as we know it. It’s fucking bleak, yeah!

And yet, Camus’s solution was to revolt. Not necessarily an armed revolution, but an internal rebellion—a refusal to bow to the meaninglessness. To create meaning through our own acts of defiance, love, creativity, and solidarity. Find pockets of hope or authenticity.

I am attempting that. Recognize the doom, feel the heartbreak, and yet live as if you can still make a difference. As if anything makes a difference. Or at least find microcosms of beauty, moments of real connection, fleeting instants of joy. Because if all we do is drown in Weltschmerz, we fail to see any glimmer of possibility and absolution. And they would love that.

Sure, it’s a balancing act. On some days, you just want to run off into the woods, drop out of society, and carve out a quiet existence far away from the madness. But the world is inescapable. You can’t isolate yourself out of collective misery. I’ve tried.

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Weltschmerz is a double-edged sword. It’s proof that we’re sensitive to the pain of the world, that we care about more than our little bubble. It also fucking hurts. It’s the heartbreak of wanting a better world and seeing that we might not get it, or we might not get it in time. We might be so busy funneling wealth to the top 1% that we run out of resources to keep society afloat. We might be so fixated on nationalism and resource hoarding that we let climate catastrophes destroy entire regions of the globe.

Franz Kafka wrote,

“There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe... but not for us.”

(Kafka, always the optimist, distilling that existential sense of despair. What a cheery fellow. I love him.)

Still, the fact that hope exists at all, even if we can’t see it materializing, is something to hold onto, I guess, if only as a rebellious act against yourself. Maybe we won’t win, but we’ll fight anyway. Why not?

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Weltschmerz, for me, is the quiet hum of sorrow that’s always there in the background: a sorrow for the planet, for the people ground down, for the children who will inherit hell. But it also spurs me to do something—anything. Even if it’s just writing this long, raw, melancholic rant a couple of thousand weirdos like you will read. It will, at least, let you know that you’re not alone.

So here we are, together in the moist mist (always wanted to write that), scanning for cracks of light. I want to believe that our shared melancholia can be the impetus for forging new possibilities, for helping each other survive in a system that was never built for human flourishing.

Weltschmerz is the price we pay for refusing to numb ourselves completely to the world’s tragedy. That hurt is also a signal that we’re alive—alive as a collective. Maybe tomorrow we’ll find each other, come together, embracing and very furiously kissing, shouting, “[removed for inciting violence]”

Have a perfect little day,

Antonio Melonio

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