The cognitive dissonance of celebrating small joys while the world falls apart.
How do I celebrate my husband’s birthday the day after we all witnessed ICE murder Renee Good in broad daylight?
How do we carry on with our days after such atrocities occur? How are we still answering emails, joining Zoom meetings, and going grocery shopping when the world is burning around us? When Israel is committing genocide? When there is a mass shooting in America nearly every day? When ICE is dragging people out of their homes or kidnapping people at school? When people with so-called authority are shooting people in the head for… sitting in their car?
It felt really weird to be baking a birthday cake last week. We had to keep telling ourselves, and each other, to avoid social media. Was it the “right” thing to do? Unsure, but it protected our mental health, on a day that should have been full of joy. A birthday! A day to celebrate another revolution around the sun!
It’s felt weird for a while. On the medium screen, the endless barrage of bad news: looming war (WWIII or Civil War II, which will be first?), political chaos, climate collapse, economic downturn, bad, bad, bad. On the tiny screen, personal moments of joy: birthday celebrations, milestone achievements, good meals, cooking tutorials, pottery content, dog videos.
Both screens show reality. And holding those distinctly different versions of reality at the same time is exhausting.
I think what a lot of us are experiencing right now isn’t only stress or burnout — it’s cognitive dissonance. The mental strain of trying to reconcile two realities that don’t sit neatly together: a world that feels like it’s on fire, and a personal life that keeps… happening.
I’ll feel happy about something small and almost immediately feel disoriented. Like “am I allowed to feel this?” Like joy requires a footnote. Like celebration needs context. Like happiness is somehow irresponsible. Like if I am posting dog photos, I don’t care about the truly horrible shit happening in the world.
This dissonance shows up everywhere. We’re expected to be informed but not overwhelmed. Engaged but not consumed. Compassionate but still productive. To care deeply about the state of the world while continuing to function inside systems that feel increasingly broken. To hold grief and normalcy in the same body, sometimes in the same hour.
We keep reaching for the word “balance”, but balance implies two sides evenly weighted. What we’re dealing with feels much more volatile than that. It’s not balance; it’s constant reconciliation. A daily attempt to make incompatible truths coexist without tearing ourselves apart.
One of the ways people cope with this is compartmentalization, a word that tends to sound colder than it actually is. It’s often framed as avoidance or denial, but I’m not convinced that’s fair. I don’t think compartmentalization always means pretending the house isn’t burning. I think sometimes it means stepping out of the smoke long enough to breathe.
There’s a version of awareness that’s clarifying, and another that’s paralyzing. When we’re exposed to suffering constantly, our nervous systems don’t magically rise to the occasion; they shut down. So we scroll. We numb ourselves. Or we swing the other direction and try to perform constant seriousness, as if joy is something we should temporarily suspend until the world improves.
That’s where I really feel the dissonance: the idea that personal joy and global suffering are mutually exclusive. That to be ethical or awake or compassionate, we must flatten our own lives. That small wins don’t count right now. That happiness is, at best, a distraction — and at worst, a moral failure. But refusing joy doesn’t actually resolve the contradiction. It just adds another layer of loss.
The world doesn’t get better simply because we suppress happiness in the name of taking the world seriously. All that really happens is that our own lives become smaller, more brittle, easier to break. At the same time, I don’t fully buy the counter-narrative either — the idea that joy is inherently radical or that happiness alone is a form of resistance. That framing feels too clear-cut for something so complicated.
Joy doesn’t fix the world, but despair doesn’t either. This isn’t about disengaging or sticking my head in the sand — it’s about surviving long enough to stay human.
Coping with cognitive dissonance isn’t about choosing one reality over the other. It’s about learning how to let them coexist without demanding resolution.
That might look like:
- Staying informed, but setting real boundaries around how much you consume
- Allowing yourself to feel joy without immediately qualifying it
- Letting grief be present without insisting it dominate every moment
- Accepting that some days you’ll feel okay, and other days you won’t, and neither is a failure of character
None of this feels elegant. If you are an empathetic human being, the discomfort doesn’t go away. The dissonance doesn’t resolve; it just becomes something you learn to carry with more awareness and care.
Perhaps the goal isn’t to eliminate the tension (it sure would be nice though), but to stop letting it convince us that we’re doing something wrong by continuing to live.
The world is on fire. That’s real. And we’re still here, making dinner, learning new skills, celebrating birthdays, creating things that don’t solve anything but make life feel inhabitable.
Holding both is uncomfortable, but pretending one cancels out the other somehow feels even worse.
So this is me, trying to cope — not by resolving the contradiction, but by acknowledging it. I’m letting the dissonance exist without letting it erase my humanity.
I don’t have a better answer than that. I don’t have advice to make life feel less heavy. My coping mechanisms are just that: coping mechanisms, and not a panacea. I don’t even know why I started writing this, but if this makes you feel seen, that’s my tidbit of joy today.
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