What a Time: Stillness in the Midst of Online Chaos
It feels like we’ve hit peak insanity online these last few weeks. The pace, the outrage, the constant stream of anger and vitriol, feeling far from people, can feel unbearable. Even with a carefully curated feed, it seems impossible to avoid the flood. Former pastors, old friends, people we once loved and trusted show up in our feeds spewing racism, divisiveness, and self-righteous narcissism. We find ourselves getting caught up in it too. We want to scream and fight back. It’s dizzying, crazy-making and scary.
I know I’m not alone in this.
I feel the pull of rage-bait, the addictive cycle of scrolling, the spike of adrenaline when I stumble across yet another post that confirms just how far we seem from each other. I feel the anger. I feel the grief. I feel the world’s overwhelm too.
What I also know: if I don’t have strict boundaries – time limits, intentional breaks, ways of grounding myself – I get swallowed whole. My nervous system can’t hold it. Maybe yours can’t either.
Naming What We Feel
There’s something important about simply naming what’s happening inside us. This is not just “being dramatic.” Our bodies react to online chaos as if it’s happening right in front of us. Rage-bait is designed that way. We’re not weak for being affected; the systems at play are engineered to capture attention, trigger outrage, and keep us hooked.
So when you notice your heart pounding, your chest tightening, your jaw clenching, that’s your body saying: This matters.It’s a nervous system that’s registering threat.
It’s also an invitation.
Because the work is not just in noticing the trigger – it’s in choosing what we do next. Do we numb? Do we lash out? Do we spiral in despair? Or can we expand our capacity, stay with the discomfort, and learn to be still right there in the fire?
That’s the practice.
Learning From Different Ways of Being
I’m grateful for the years I’ve spent learning from marginalized people groups around the world. The communities I’ve witnessed and been part of have carried hard-won wisdom about how to exist, resist, and make change in the face of relentless oppression.
What strikes me most is that their approach is rarely frenetic. It’s rarely individualistic. It doesn’t demand that one person carries the whole world on their back.
Instead, it’s collective. It’s embodied. It’s connected to land and earth. It respects capacity. It recognises cycles of rest and work, grief and joy, silence and song. It plays the long game. I don’t want to romanticise how challenging it is, but it feels so different.
Watching online culture often feels like the opposite: constant urgency, performative rage, endless polarisation, the belief that if I don’t fix it right now, everything will collapse.
The truth is, that energy burns us out. It strips us of joy, of connection, of the ability to sustain change over the long haul. And sometimes it makes us look a lot like the systems we’re resisting.
Practices for Expanding Capacity
So how do we respond when the online world is a firestorm, and our nervous systems are screaming?
We practice.
And by practice, I don’t mean perfection. I don’t mean rigid discipline. I mean little ways of choosing presence again and again.
Notice without fusing. When a wave of anger or grief comes, can you say: “This is anger. This is grief.” Notice it, breathe with it, but don’t become it. You are not your rage. You are not your despair.
Return to the body. Put your feet on the ground. Feel the weight of your seat on the chair. Place your hand on your chest and take three slow breaths, stamp your feet, shake out your hands like you’re flicking off water. These small movements bring us back from spiralling thoughts into grounded presence.
Choose pauses. Before reacting, before reposting, before spiralling into comments, pause. Even a two-second pause interrupts the loop.
Connect to nature. Go outside. Touch a tree, watch the sky, feel the wind. This re-orients us away from the endless online churn and back into a rhythm that has been here long before us and will be here long after.
Let community hold you. Don’t try to carry it alone. Call a friend, join a circle, or even just sit with others in a cafe. Being together helps us metabolise what feels unbearable in isolation.
These practices don’t remove the chaos. They don’t magically make injustice disappear. But they do grow our capacity to be with reality without being consumed by it. They allow us to respond and not react.
The Discomfort of Choosing Different
If you’ve grown up in high-control religion, or if you’ve learned to abandon yourself for the sake of others, choosing stillness and limits can feel almost impossible at first.
It will feel wrong to turn off your phone.
It will feel selfish to step away from helping.
It will feel lazy to rest.
It will feel like betrayal to refuse the pull of urgency.
That discomfort doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It means you’re learning a new way.
We’ve been conditioned to find our worth in productivity, service, performance, and constant availability. To walk another path will feel deeply unfamiliar – even frightening. But slowly, gently, as we practice, it becomes more natural.
And something else happens too: our joy begins to return.
Stillness as Resistance
I sometimes think of stillness as a form of resistance. Trisha Hersey’s work on rest as resistance is so important.
Stillness is not passivity. It’s not avoidance. It’s not denial.
Stillness is choosing not to be hijacked by every outrage. It’s refusing to hand over your nervous system to the algorithm. It’s grounding in your own body and in the earth itself.
Action flows from stillness – but it will be action rooted in clarity, in love, in wisdom, not in frantic reactivity.
From stillness, we can grieve without being drowned.
From stillness, we can act without being consumed.
From stillness, we can sustain.
A Collective Invitation
I’m recently started offering a weekly meditation drop-in.
It’s not because meditation fixes everything. It doesn’t.
It’s not because I have all the answers. I don’t.
It’s because I believe we need spaces to practice stillness together.
Spaces where we can show up as we are – overwhelmed, triggered, weary, hopeful – and learn to breathe, to notice, to return.
Spaces where we can remember that our nervous systems are not machines. That our grief belongs in community. That we don’t have to hold the weight of the world alone.
Spaces like this create room for our bodies to soften and for our capacity to grow.
It’s not a quick fix. It’s not flashy. It’s slow, quiet work.
But it’s the kind of work that helps us stay human in insane times.
Another way
So if the online world feels like it’s spiralling out of control, you’re not imagining it. If your body feels on edge, it makes sense. If you need limits and breaks and silence, you’re not weak – you’re wise.
This moment is loud. But we don’t have to let it drown us.
This moment is overwhelming. But we don’t have to lose ourselves in it.
This moment is urgent. But we don’t have to forget who we are and what we value.
We can choose another way.
We can learn from wisdom that is deeper than the algorithm, older than outrage, steadier than the chaos. Together, we can practice stillness.
What a time. And yet, here we are.