What worries me most isn’t the world, but how I’m reacting to it

I’ve always seen myself as a non-violent person.

Even when I was angry at stuff, I was pretty convinced violence is basically a dead end. That it just makes things worse in the end.

But over the last few years… I don’t know, something has shifted a bit in how I react.

When I look at the rise of the far right in a lot of places, the concentration of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands, the feeling that some people can basically do whatever they want without consequences, and this kind of extreme individualism everywhere… I notice it changes something in me.

I used to immediately reject more radical antifascist or anti-capitalist groups. Now I find myself, sometimes at least, understanding the anger behind them more than I expected. And even understanding how some people end up thinking violence might be a legitimate answer.

That’s the part that unsettles me.

I still think violence comes with a huge cost and usually just creates more problems than it solves. But I can’t ignore that certain situations make me feel a kind of anger I didn’t really have before.

It’s not even that the world feels completely new or anything. There’s always been injustice.

It’s more that I’m noticing my own reactions changing, and that’s what I find hard to ignore.

Things that would have felt completely unacceptable to me 10 years ago don’t feel as simple anymore. Not in a clear “I agree” way, but more like… I understand how someone could get there.

I don’t really know what to call that. Exhaustion, clarity, cynicism, maybe just getting older and seeing the same patterns repeat.

But I felt like I needed to write it down somewhere. Throwaway account.