Three things I’m thinking about in the mental health landscape

1. This is water: In 2005, David Foster Wallace opened his Kenyon College address with a parable: two young fish are swimming along when an older fish passes and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” After a while, one young fish turns to the other and asks, “What the hell is water?”

2. Muddy waters: Social media continues to erode the fabric of our culture and communities. It’s a dark, muddy water we’ve grown used to navigating—reshaping how we think, how we feel, how we believe we should live, while stealing and monetizing our attention. But this isn’t normal. And it keeps getting weirder, pushing us in directions none of us truly want to go. Over time (and now, 22 years after Facebook’s emergence), it is making us more divided than ever. The long-term effects are starting to show.

3. Triggers as signals: What’s triggering you? And why that, specifically? What sets you off may not bother someone else at all. That gap matters: our triggers often point to old wounds, unmet needs, or stories we’ve told ourselves for a long time—stories we then act out on the wrong people online, further eroding our communities and widening the divide between us.

There is simply no substitute for the real world. No work “family” can replace a real family. No online community can replace relationships with your neighbors. In the real world, you can’t easily hit a mute button or swipe away when adversity shows up. And it turns out there are real consequences when we start treating offline relationships the way we treat online ones.

Wallace’s point is that the real trap isn’t in obviously “bad” beliefs, but in the unconscious ways we worship things. (Remember, he said this only one year after the emergence of Facebook.) The world rewards this default mode, which keeps us self-centered and restless. True freedom is learning to notice the “water” we swim in—to choose awareness, to care about others, and to sacrifice for them in small, unglamorous ways, instead of drifting along in polluted waters.