Personal Grief Creates Heroes. Collective Grief Creates Revolutions

Most of us are already emotionally prepared for the pain of the Great Reset for one important reason, and for which we can feel paradoxically blessed

I want you to imagine for a moment the saddest you’ve ever felt. 

Perhaps it was the death of a family member or friend. Perhaps it was the end of a dear friendship over some stupid argument. Or perhaps (and I would venture – most likely) it was the end of a romantic relationship. 

Most people are lucky enough to avoid life’s most horrific tragedies – things like the loss of a child, or a close sibling before their time, and I salute anyone who has weathered such a storm and emerged intact. 

Most of us, however, know very well the pain; the hopelessness; the utter misery of finding oneself alone after the departure of a spouse or romantic partner – especially a long term one. It is undoubtedly the form of grief most common to human experience. Tony Soprano puts it best when awkwardly counselling his son after a breakup:

Tony: "Everybody gets the blues. There's a half a billion dollar industry devoted to it."
AJ: "Prozac?"
Tony: "No, the music business. They write thousands of songs about this shit! 'Tears on My Pillow,' 'Mona Lisa,' right?" 

I’ve just asked you to imagine the saddest you’ve ever felt, and the chances are you are recalling a relationship breakup. Maybe not, you may have experienced something worse – this is not as important though as the common thread that runs through all forms of personal grief: 

You do it alone. 

It doesn’t matter how many friends you have around you saying sympathetic and encouraging things; it doesn’t matter how gallantly your family steps in to help you hold things together; it does not even matter if you quickly find a new lover to enfold your grief in a narcotic blanket of sex and admiration – you still bear that grief on your own. 

That grief is only yours, as your soul is only yours. That grief is more personal to you than your deepest yearnings and darkest secrets – because it cannot be shared. People can empathise with it, but no one else can experience or fully understand the idiosyncratic permutations of your grief. You carry it alone and it either crushes or strengthens you, but regardless of the outcome it is yours to bear, and nothing in this earthly realm will ever change that. 

Have I accurately described your recollection of the saddest you’ve ever felt? Can you recall that wretched moment when you realised that all the poignant conversations with close friends; all the booze, drugs, and cigarettes; all the days off work; all the therapy in the world cannot offload that pain, and it is yours alone to bear until it finally subsides? 

Perhaps you’re one of those lucky few who don’t feel this sort of pain, but my experience has taught me that most of us go through it at least a couple of times.  

Once more – please imagine the saddest you’ve ever felt, and now remember the anxiety, panic, and terror of that moment when you understood that at the end of the day no one was in it with you, and you were essentially completely alone. 

Take a moment, please, and recall that pain as vividly as you can. 

Okay, now I want you to imagine that somehow, by some bizarre inversion of metaphysical reality, that millions of other people were simultaneously hit with your pain – not their own version of your pain (like a support group where you all share a similar story but each with its own myriad variables, and at the end of which you return home to your own unique isolation) but precisely your pain – not even a carbon copy, but an identical clone, as if they were there inside you, feeling it all in real time with you. 

Do you think this would change the nature of your pain? 

At the time of this first draft, it had been 18 days since I went for a run and during that downtime I had been experiencing the pain that I have just described here. Last Saturday (30 September) I laced up my runners and did 10km in Melbourne’s warmest spring weather so far this season, an obstinate 28°C, and on that run I had time to consider the nature of grief and what makes it so awful, and my sweaty contemplations led me to the conclusion I have outlined above – that the worst thing about it is not the pain itself, but that we do it alone. 

No one can know exactly what it felt like to curl your fingers around your spouse’s under the duvet one stormy Saturday morning and exchange cozy murmurings as a thunderclap broke right above your bedroom. No one can know the simple yet wondrous contentment of the way you shared your menial household duties and somehow made the whole tangled mess function smartly week in, week out. No one can know the profound love that encapsulates the silly pet names you had for one another or the secret language you spoke when no one else was listening; the songs you sang; your own glorious private madness.

No one can ever feel these things, and worse, when they are taken from you, no one can feel the anguish that accompanies this loss. 

But what if they could? 

Imagine if a million other people, or a billion, or even the whole world were hit with an exact clone of your grief, your pain, your loss, at precisely the same time. 

I think it would make things exponentially easier. 

Most of us experience grief alone. But when the Great Reset, or the New World Order, or Agenda 2030 (or whatever you like to refer to it as) really bites; when they take away our overseas holidays, our ability to move freely, our property, our rights of free expression and assembly, and our ability to freely transact with untraceable currency on an open market – if and when this happens, it will happen to all of us simultaneously.  

Unlike the mendacious pronunciations of our Dear Leaders during the COVID lockdowns, we will quite literally all be in it together.  

My hypothesis here is that what awaits us if the stated plans of our ruling elite are not forestalled, while materially tougher than the challenge of losing a long-term partner, will in fact be emotionally and spiritually easier for the simple fact that none of us will face it alone. 

My intention is not to conflate the grief of personal loss with the existential challenge of tyranny – but hardship is hardship, and the pain of adversity, whatever its cause, can, I believe, be reasonably placed into one big basket. 

There are two states of being, broadly speaking: Comfort and adversity. 

Comfort feels good and strengthens us in many ways – our wellbeing derives largely from love; the love others bear us, and the love we bear for ourselves, and the latter is in no small part reliant on the former. And these feelings of security and fellowship provide us with the motivation required to live good lives. But comfort can also weaken us. One need only point to the societal decay of the West precipitated by the great plenty of the post-WW2 era; indeed, it is true that too much comfort can eventually destroy a person or a society.  

Adversity hurts, and it weakens us in the immediate term, and if left unchecked it too can destroy us. But pain also strengthens us if we treat it with the respect it deserves. This is difficult because our instinct is to run from it, or mask it. 

Comfort and adversity: it is a yin and yang dynamic which Jordan Peterson, for one, has discussed at length.  

While the emotions and day-to-day challenges of personal grief are markedly different from those of brutalisation by tyrannical forces, such as we endured during 2020 and 2021, and are likely to endure again soon, they fall into the same basket:  

Adversity. 

Adversity which leads to feelings of anxiety and fear, confusion, uncertainty, loss, and, indeed, grief. 

When my five-year relationship ended three weeks ago, I wallowed for some time in booze and self-loathing – though I am pleased to say I have largely avoided the trap of self-pity, which can turn a bad situation into a horrific one, not just for the sufferer himself, but for everyone around him, and in extremis – render him not only emotionally alone, but physically and socially alone also. 

Nevertheless, somewhere amid this ordeal I grasped the singular truth of personal grief: that it is ours alone to bear. But when I finally put on my running shoes and pushed through the pain to prove to myself that I still had the manhood to run 10km in less than 60 minutes after two weeks of drinking and smoking up to a pack of cigarettes a day, I did not actually do that part alone – I drew on my own painstakingly accumulated wisdom, the daily advice of friends, and, in no small part, on this Andrew Tate clip, which I also shared in my last post.

There are practical ways through adversity, whatever its cause... grief or tyranny, or whatever – and it can indeed start with something as simple as going for a run, or cleaning your room as the contemporary proverb holds. 

The way through grief? Do things that bring order to your life and make you feel stronger and more capable. It is a triumph of the will to get out and run 10km while gripped with grief, but compared to the pain of waking each morning in an empty bed and understanding that a whole new day of solitary pain has dawned, putting one foot after another several thousand times over a period of sixty heart-pounding minutes is relatively straightforward, and importantly, it is a burden that others can help you shoulder.  

The way through the pain is tough, but relatively simple. The pain part itself isn’t as simple. It hurts. It hurts all day, every day – and one is never sure how long that will last. All I know is we must do that part on our own. 

The way through tyranny? My hypothesis is somewhat untested (although we all had a dry run during the COVID scam) but it’s much the same as the way through grief: Finding practical ways to bring order to the chaos – becoming stronger and more resourceful.  

I could be way off on this, but I suspect that the practical steps required to navigate the privations of the Great Reset, while tough and challenging, and necessitating great willpower and resolve, may be similarly straight forward to execute. It will essentially be a case of one foot after another. 

The pain part however, when it comes to tyranny, is different from personal grief. That pain, that rage, that sadness we will feel when our comfortable lives are assaulted once more by the forces of evil – that part we will not do alone. That pain, we will all bear together. 

The big difference I see is that if the day arrives when they do bring the hammer down, and we wake each morning not to an empty space where our lover used to be, but to the anguish of the memory of our old lives, we will not be alone in this; there will be billions of others right there with us. 

As such, it is my working hypothesis that anyone who can bear the solitary emotional pain of personal grief yet continue taking practical steps to function and move forward, already has the spiritual fortitude required to weather the storm that is coming our way.  

But here’s the real kicker: That great spiritual solidarity we will share; our shared pain, will furnish the collective resourcefulness required to mobilise a mass movement the likes of which the world has never seen. 

Personal grief can make of each of us a hero. 

Collective grief can create revolutions.