People around me have been rambling about the literal hell we’re all going through right now—the shadows of a possible world war, the longstanding inflation and non-stop price hikes, situationships and non-commitment, and being surrounded by people with no common sense at all.

Too much of an introduction, right? I know.

I’ve been affected by these noises, too. And I am honestly sick of them all.

As someone who lives in a country where instability is the norm, it’s pretty much a huge part of my daily digest whenever my mom shows up by my room’s window just to yap about what she saw on the news or on social media. She’s her usual talkative self whenever it’s the typical bad news about our government, but she’d start questioning every tidbit whenever, by miracle, she gets news that is surprisingly pleasing or beneficial.

There are nights when I would just lie awake, thinking whether Caleb and I are actually going to make it.

Caleb is very young and innocent, yet interestingly intuitive for his age. Lately, I find myself struggling to explain the rationale and logic behind the things he sees when we go out, because he’d immediately start digging into a rabbit hole of questions. I don’t want him to carry too many things at once.

I want him to think like a normal kid.

You know—just toys, food, and fun.

Maybe that’s also why I’ve been going outside more frequently these days. Whether it’s a café date with friends, a gym session, or even just a walk after I drop Caleb off at school.

I don’t know. I guess I became hungry for the outdoors after living through a stagnant relationship and a pandemic at the same time. The first quarter of 2026 hits differently, though. I find quiet whenever I am outside—just being myself, enjoying my time alone, or talking with my friends about literally anything except work, graduate school, and the never-ending act of surviving adulthood.

And maybe that’s where tonight’s realization came from.

When the Noise Gets Too Loud

One of my recent classes with my students turned into a long conversation about how much chaos we unintentionally absorb from the internet and from the people around us. What started as a normal discussion somehow spiraled into us talking about how overwhelming the news cycle has become—how every scroll seems to throw another crisis our way.

And honestly, I’m guilty of that, too. There are moments when I catch myself doomscrolling on social media, hopping from one headline to another, from one comment section to the next, until I realize I’ve been absorbing too many things at the same time. It’s like letting the entire world’s problems pour into your brain all at once.

We eventually realized something while talking about it: constantly drowning ourselves in all that noise doesn’t actually help us move forward. At some point, it just makes us feel helpless, like we’re carrying the weight of everything happening in the world all at once.

Of course, staying informed still matters. But there’s also a point where too much of it starts messing with our heads. It makes us anxious about everything simultaneously, even about things that are far beyond what we can control. It’s not like the people responsible are that easy to reach and simply tell them to do better anyway.

And maybe it hits harder because I belong to a generation that has already survived quite a lot in a relatively short span of time—living through a pandemic, navigating young parenthood, growing up in a systematically broken third-world country, and trying to make sense of all the chaos that keeps unfolding around us.

Sometimes it honestly feels like we were forced to grow up faster than we expected.

But maybe that’s also why I’ve been learning to create small pockets of peace wherever I can.

That class reminded me of something simple but important—to be a little kinder to myself for surviving the day, and to redirect my energy toward something good, even if it’s just a small thing.

Because sometimes, that’s enough to remind us that goodness still exists.

That even the tiniest speck of something positive can travel farther than we think.

Maybe I can’t fix the entire world, but maybe I can slowly build small fragments of the kind of life I want to live—my own little version of paradise.

Maybe part of that tiny paradise is simply protecting small moments of normalcy for Caleb, too.

And maybe, in the middle of all this noise, these little things are already enough to keep going.