The Year Everyone Snapped
The Physical & Emotional Disconnection from Others
I posted a story about an interaction I had walking my dog where a woman yanked her dogs back and snapped at me before I could even speak, and the response was overwhelming.
Not because it was about dogs. But because you’ve felt it too.
Thousands of you wrote to say the same thing:
That something’s shifted.
That everyday interactions feel heavier, more charged.
That people seem angrier, more on edge.
That kindness has become something you have to brace for, like maybe it’ll land, maybe it won’t.
And I’ve been thinking about it nonstop.
Because it’s not just L.A.
It’s not just cities.
It’s not just neighborhoods where community has thinned.
It’s everywhere.
It’s a mood. A texture in the air. A persistent grief sitting just under the surface of everything. And it makes sense.
We’re living through an era of chronic overwhelm. Fires, floods, forced evacuations, shifting rights, shrinking hope, rising pressure, broken systems…and the relentless pace of it all means there's no time to metabolize any of it.
So it lingers.
In our bodies.
In our interactions.
On the sidewalks.
In the grocery store parking lot.
At the dog park.
We are a species mid-exhale, still waiting for relief that never comes.
And when you’re walking around with that kind of internal overload, even neutral exchanges feel like friction. Someone walking too close. Someone driving too slow. Someone waving too late. The “wrong” tone of voice. The “wrong” glance. The “wrong” moment to let your dog say hi.
It’s like the human spirit has sunburn and every brush with life rubs against the raw.
We’re not doing well. And we don’t have the margin to pretend anymore.
You can feel it on the sidewalks now: people avoiding eye contact not because they’re cold, but because even that flicker of connection costs more than they have to give.
We used to hold space for each other. Now we’re all just holding on.
And the part I keep coming back to is: this isn’t who we are.
It’s who we are becoming under pressure.
Because when you are under-resourced and overexposed, you don’t have the capacity to show up with grace. You show up guarded. Defensive. Prickly. Resigned.
But that’s not because people are mean.
It’s because they’re maxed out.
So if you’ve felt this too, this shift in tone, this lack of warmth, this constant low-grade hostility in the air, know that you’re not imagining it.
You’re just paying attention.
You’re just awake.
And being awake right now is exhausting. I’ve created this resource for you, ‘Staying Soft in a Hard World: 7 Science-Backed Tools for Navigating a Fried Nervous System Culture’.
It takes real energy to stay soft in a world that keeps hardening.
It takes courage to keep being friendly when everyone’s bracing for conflict.
It takes focus to stay human when everything is trying to pull you into reaction.
But that’s the work.
Not just because it’s who we want to be but because it’s how we survive this moment with our hearts intact.
So no, that moment on the sidewalk wasn’t about dogs.
It was about what it costs to remain open.
What it takes to still lead with warmth.
And what’s being slowly eroded when the world around us stays stuck in hypervigilance.
We don’t need to fix everything. But we do need to see each other again.
In the glance.
In the wave.
In the extra breath before we react.
Because hostile energy does travel on a leash.
But so does grace.
And the leash is in our hands.
With you in this.
Love, Zelana