A Perfectly Reasonable Response

If you’ve ever been to therapy, you’re probably familiar with a particular question. The wording varies, but it goes something like: “Is your reaction one that a reasonable person would have to the same situation?” It’s a calibration tool. Helps you figure out if you’re catastrophizing, spiraling, responding to ghosts instead of reality.

I asked myself that question recently. Then I looked around. Really looked.

And I thought: yeah, actually. I think the average reasonable person feels exactly the same way.

Taking Stock

So what exactly is a reasonable person looking at right now?

The economic picture: Housing costs have decoupled from wages in ways that would have seemed absurd a generation ago. A college degree, once a ticket to the middle class, now functions mostly as an expensive entry fee to a job market that may or may not have a place for you. Your parents bought a house at 30. You might rent forever. The math doesn’t work anymore, and everyone under 40 knows it.

The social and political picture: We don’t agree on what’s real anymore. I don’t mean we have different opinions; that’s always been true. I mean we’re operating from different fact bases, different realities. The algorithms that govern what we see have Balkanized us into epistemic silos. The people around you aren’t just wrong about politics; they’re watching a completely different movie than you are.

The institutional picture: Trust in government and public institutions has been in freefall for decades. Some of that erosion is earned. Some of it is manufactured. All of it leaves you with the feeling that you’re on your own in ways previous generations weren’t.

The environmental picture: I’m not here to relitigate climate science. The scientists who study this for a living are using words like “irreversible” and “catastrophic” with increasing frequency. The people whose job it is to be measured and careful are not being measured and careful anymore. That should tell you something.

The technological picture: “You grew up with computers and turned out fine” misses the point entirely. I grew up with a desktop in the living room that dialed up to the internet with a noise like a dying fax machine (until we got DSL, of course). I did not grow up with a trillion-dollar company employing a thousand PhDs in behavioral psychology to optimize an algorithm that keeps me scrolling at 2 AM. Those are not the same thing. We handed an entire generation a dopamine slot machine disguised as a social life and then wondered why they’re depressed.

Add it up. Any one of these might be manageable in isolation. But we’re not dealing with them in isolation. We’re dealing with all of them, all the time, while an attention economy strips us of the cognitive resources we’d need to process any of it.

A reasonable person, looking at this, would feel something. Dread, maybe. Grief. Anger. Helplessness. Some days all four before lunch.

When the Answer Is Yes

So here’s where that therapy question breaks.

The whole point of asking “Would a reasonable person respond this way?” is to help you identify when your reaction is disproportionate. When the fear is irrational. When you’re the variable that needs adjusting.

But what happens when the answer is yes?

What happens when the anxiety isn’t a malfunction but a signal? When the dread is proportionate? When your nervous system is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do in the face of genuine threat?

The diagnosis inverts. The pathology isn’t in the patient. It’s in the environment.

To be clear: therapy helps. More people need it, not fewer. The coping tools are real tools: journaling, exercise, better sleep, medication when appropriate. These things work. They’ve helped me. I’m not here to tell anyone to throw away their prescription or cancel their therapist.

But there’s a difference between treating a wound and asking why everyone keeps getting cut.

We’ve gotten remarkably good at helping individuals survive a sick system. What we haven’t done, what we seem pathologically incapable of doing, is questioning the system itself. The conversation stays locked at the individual level. You need coping skills. You need to practice resilience. You need to adjust.

The treatments are valid. What’s broken, I now realize, is a narrative that consistently places the origin of the problem inside individual brains rather than in the conditions those brains are trying to survive.

And nowhere is that narrative more entrenched than in the story we’ve been told about what depression actually is.

The Story We Were Told

For thirty years, we’ve been told a story about depression.

You’ve heard it. You’ve probably repeated it. It goes like this: depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, specifically a shortage of serotonin. The ads showed it with helpful little diagrams. Sad blob in your head, not enough happy molecules bouncing around. Take this pill, correct the imbalance, feel better.

It was clean. It was medical. It removed the stigma by removing the self from the equation. You weren’t weak or broken or failing at life. You just had a deficiency, like a diabetic needs insulin.

There was just one problem: it was never really true.

In 2022, researchers at University College London published an umbrella review, a study of studies, examining decades of research on serotonin and depression. Their conclusion was blunt: there is no convincing evidence that depression is caused by lower serotonin levels or reduced serotonin activity. The lead researcher, Professor Joanna Moncrieff, said it plainly: “This belief is not grounded in evidence.”

To be clear: antidepressants help people. The research supports that, and so does the lived experience of millions. But the exact reason why they help remains somewhat unclear (more recent hypotheses involve neuroplasticity and BDNF, but that’s a rabbit hole for another day). We were given a tidy explanation that turned out to be marketing copy, not science. The medications are real; the story we were told about them wasn’t.

And yet eighty-five to ninety percent of the public still believes the chemical imbalance myth. We were sold a story, and we bought it wholesale.

This one never sat right with me. Maybe because I had an AP Biology teacher who drilled homeostasis into my skull until it became reflexive. Your body maintains equilibrium. It resists imbalance. If you flood a system with a neurotransmitter, the body doesn’t just accept the new normal; it compensates. Downregulates receptors. Adjusts production. Fights back toward baseline.

This is why drug tolerance exists. This is why the first coffee of the day eventually stops waking you up.

The chemical imbalance hypothesis asks you to believe the brain is somehow exempt from the most fundamental principle of biological systems.

What’s worse is what believing the myth does to people. Research shows that accepting the chemical imbalance explanation actually makes you more pessimistic about recovery. If your brain is simply broken at a chemical level, what hope is there beyond permanent pharmaceutical management? The story meant to reduce stigma may have been quietly fostering despair.

Meanwhile, the deeper questions go unasked. If it’s not a chemical deficiency, what is it? What’s actually driving the epidemic of depression and anxiety we’re watching unfold in real time?

Maybe it’s not what’s missing in our brains. Maybe it’s what’s present in our world.

Inheritance

My nephew was born recently.

Something shifted when he arrived. A weight I wasn’t expecting.

I look at him and I feel this overwhelming urge to protect him from everything. Which is normal, I think. That’s what you’re supposed to feel. But it’s mixed with something else. Something heavier.

I’m terrified of the world he’s going to inherit.

Not in an abstract way. In a specific, catalogued, keeps-me-up-at-night way. I think about climate projections and what “irreversible” actually means on a timeline that includes his adulthood. I think about literacy rates declining while attention spans shrink to fit fifteen-second videos. I think about an economy that will ask him to go into debt for credentials that may not lead anywhere. I think about the algorithms that will be competing for his focus before he’s old enough to understand what’s happening.

I think about the rising tide of youth anxiety and depression, rates that have doubled in a decade, and I wonder if despair is just going to be the baseline for his generation. Background noise. The price of admission.

More than anything, I’m scared of watching him become disenfranchised. Of seeing that light in his eyes—the one all kids have, the curiosity and openness and irrational optimism—slowly dim as the world teaches him what it taught me.

That the game might be rigged. That the people in charge might not be competent (or outright malicious). That hoping for better might be a sucker’s bet.

I don’t know what I’ll tell him when he’s old enough to ask questions. When he looks at everything and says, “Why is it like this?”

…What’s the honest answer that doesn’t break something in him?

From a Darker Week

I wrote something a while back, during a particularly dark week. It was around the time when the country felt like it shifted on its axis overnight—one of those weeks where everyone you talk to has the same look in their eyes. That “are you seeing this too?” look.

I’m not going to frame it as wisdom or a manifesto. It’s not a solution. It’s just what came out when I sat down and tried to process what I was feeling. Evidence of the struggle, I guess. A snapshot of someone trying to make sense of a moment that resists sense-making.

I’m including it here not because I think it has all the answers—it doesn’t, and I say as much in the piece itself—but because I think there’s value in documenting what this feels like from the inside. Before it gets smoothed over. Before we all pretend we weren’t rattled.

Calling All Bridge-Builders

I’ve been thinking a lot about recent world events and the increasing hyper-polarization we face both online and in our day-to-day lives. It feels as though we’ve collectively reprioritized our values, focusing more on identity and “which team you support” than on the actual issues or ideologies at stake. We’re losing the grey area, the context, that more often unites us than divides us. I find this concerning and actively harmful to our communities and collective well-being.

You, right now, reading this might think, “This is obvious, why does it need to be said?” But I believe we desperately need to hear these messages again.

In modern-day America, we have a tendency to ignore truths that inconvenience us and adopt viewpoints that merely confirm our existing biases. It hurts to admit when we’re wrong. It’s easier to conform to the herd than to look inward, think critically, and address our shortcomings, the very process that helps us grow. We all face difficulties, and we’re all looking for someone to blame, largely because it conveniently mitigates potential harm to our emotional wellbeing.

But have we considered looking inward? Have we considered that we’re more alike than we care to admit? Have we considered that the best way to challenge opposing views is to bring better ideas to the table? To participate in a marketplace where the best idea wins, rather than attacking those who disagree?

Too many people have fused their ideology with their identity, becoming rigid in their thinking. Too often, we fail to properly examine our own hurt, instead blaming others because it’s more convenient. Too often, we attribute to malice what could easily be explained by simple human error. Too often, we confuse correlation with causation. Too often, we ignore the full context of a situation before attacking our neighbors. Too often, we dismiss fundamental truths because acknowledging them might reflect poorly on us.

Let’s be honest: this statement itself is probably full of blind spots I can’t even see. Writing from a place of relative safety, I recognize that calls for dialogue might ring hollow to those fighting for their basic rights or facing immediate harm. This attempt at addressing polarization might itself be polarizing in ways I haven’t considered. I can already hear the critique: “We don’t need more dialogue, we need action!” Fair enough. But lasting action, the kind that actually changes systems, requires the messy work of building coalitions, persuading the persuadable, and yes, talking to people who don’t already agree with us. Still, even if I’m stumbling through my own biases here, I’m certain of this: building bridges doesn’t mean abandoning the foundation of human dignity that we should all stand on.

Yet still, for all our flaws and blind spots, for all the imperfection in the very text, I believe we can do better. It doesn’t have to be this way. When will this stop? Where will it end? Are we truly this lost, or do we maintain the status quo simply because it’s easier?

Here’s a particularly troubling thought: At what point might your own community turn on you for not perfectly aligning with their views? How does your group handle dissent? When presented with new information, do your peers respond with curiosity or hostility? And how much of your identity have you unconsciously tied to these beliefs?

It’s like humanity is in an SUV, racing downhill. We see the speedometer climbing, we can calculate where this leads, yet no one is reaching for the brakes as we hurtle toward the cliff’s edge.

I stepped away from social media entirely many years ago, and in hindsight, I think I got out at the best possible time. These platforms optimize for engagement, and anger drives the most clicks. The algorithms don’t care if they tear us apart; they’re designed to keep us scrolling, not united. What started out as “connecting people” has evolved into some grotesque system that really just amplifies our worst impulses.

The rapid rise of hatred and division deeply worries me, and I cannot imagine how much worse things might become if we continue on this path. I ask whoever reads this:

“Are my assumptions correct?”

“Have I considered the full picture?”

“How can I learn and perhaps even grow from this moment?”

Reading it back now, I notice the hope in it. The part of me that still believed we could pump the brakes.

I’m not sure that part is gone, exactly. But it’s quieter than it used to be.

What’s Left

So where does this leave us?

I don’t have a neat ending. I’m suspicious of anyone who does. The problems I’ve described aren’t the kind that get solved by a listicle of action items or a pep talk about resilience. “Ten Ways to Fix a Civilization in Decline” isn’t a real article, and if it were, I wouldn’t trust it.

But I keep coming back to that therapy question. The one about reasonable responses.

Maybe there’s something useful in just… naming it. In saying out loud: this isn’t you. Or rather, it isn’t only you. The weight you’re carrying isn’t a personal failing. The dread isn’t a chemical accident. The despair might actually be appropriate.

That’s not a comfortable realization. In some ways, it’s worse. A chemical imbalance can be corrected. A broken world is a bigger problem.

But there’s also something in it that feels like the beginning of sanity. The first step out of a trap is recognizing you’re in one. You can’t find the exit if you’ve been convinced the cage is just your own skull.

Here’s one thing I’ve held onto, though. One small practice that feels like it matters even when nothing else does.

I try to treat people with respect. Baseline, default, regardless. The golden rule, basically. It sounds almost embarrassingly simple to say out loud.

But you genuinely do not know what someone else is carrying on any given day. The person who cuts you off in traffic might be driving to a hospice. The coworker who snaps at you might be mid-divorce. The stranger who seems rude might be having the single worst day of their life.

You don’t know. You can’t know. So you extend the grace you’d want extended to you.

This isn’t about being a pushover or tolerating abuse. Frankly, some bridges may need to burn. Some people forfeit the right to your kindness through their actions.

But as a default posture? Dignity and respect, until proven otherwise. It costs nothing. And in a world that seems determined to strip people of both, it might be one of the few things we can actually control.

I think about my nephew. I think about what I want for him.

I want him to feel things fully without being crushed by them. I want him to see clearly without becoming cynical. I want him to ask hard questions and not settle for easy answers. I want him to find people who see what he sees and feel less alone because of it.

I want him to know that if the world ever makes him sad, it might not be because something is wrong with him. It might be because he’s paying attention. And that paying attention, even when it hurts, is not a disease. It’s a form of respect for what’s real.

I don’t know what kind of world he’ll inherit. I don’t know if we’ll figure any of this out in time.

But I’d rather he face it with clear eyes and an open heart, knowing that what he feels might actually be a reasonable response to an unreasonable world.