No Place to Go (Again)

No Place to Go (Again)

Grief isn’t always about death.

Sometimes it’s about watching the world fracture in ways you can’t fix. Not with a vote. Not with a donation. Not with another opinion screamed into the void. Just sitting there, feeling it, while the tide turns, and you know it’s turning the wrong way.

That’s the kind of grief I’ve been carrying lately.

I’m grieving the slow collapse of global cooperation. The rebranding of cruelty as “strength.” The way fascism is creeping, not just in the big powers, but everywhere. And the way we all pretend like we’re not seeing it.

It’s not just Gaza or Ukraine. It’s Hungary, India, El Salvador. It’s Italy, Tunisia, Argentina. France and Germany, where the far right isn’t on the fringes anymore, it’s centre stage. And yeah, even New Zealand. Where imported culture wars are finally landing. Where conspiracy thinking and power-for-power’s-sake are seeping into the cracks.

It’s happening quietly. And it’s isolating us.

We’re watching globalisation die in real time. We built a borderless world, and now we’re building walls inside it. The shared world we thought we were building now feels like a bad bet.

And maybe the part that cuts deepest is what we’ve lost online.

Because once, the internet was freedom. A place where ideas roamed without permission. Where misfits could be curious, anonymous, honest. Where truth didn’t need branding. Where a kid with a modem and too much time could outthink a system built to control him.

I came of age in that world. The world of the electron and the switch. It was chaotic and wild and full of promise. It told us that knowledge should be free, that power should be questioned, that the outsiders still had something worth hearing.

Somewhere deep in that current was a voice — The Mentor’s Last Words — defiant, poetic, unafraid. It wasn’t just a manifesto. It was a love letter to a world being born, and a warning about what would come to kill it.

We didn’t know then how fast that world would close in.

Now the internet is tidy. Controlled. Commercial. No longer a frontier, just another marketplace. Connection is measured in engagement. Curiosity in clicks. And rebellion is an aesthetic, not a threat.

I keep refreshing the news like it’s going to give me closure. But it never does. It just adds weight. And I carry that weight, because not carrying it feels like forgetting.

I’m not done grieving. And maybe you aren’t either.

Because grief is only love with nowhere left to go. And I loved this world, its borderless dreams, its strange optimism, the fragile sense that maybe, just maybe, we were building something better.

We’re allowed to mourn the world we were trying to build. We’re allowed to feel it breaking. We’re allowed to whisper what that old voice once screamed:

“This is our world now.”

Maybe not anymore. But I still believe it could be again.

That’s not weakness. That’s humanity. And somewhere beneath the noise, that’s resistance.