We Have Forgotten How to Grieve — And It Is Costing Us Our Lives

Grief today, as a concept, is mostly linked to one specific event: "Physical Death".

This shouldn't be the case...

Grief is not a rare psychological accident reserved for funerals or catastrophic loss.

Grief is what happens every time life changes faster than our identity can follow.

And life changes constantly.

---

Every ending demands grief.

Every beginning demands grief.

Every transition demands grief.

And every time something becomes irreversible, the body grieves.

Growing up is grief.

Aging is grief.

Falling out of love is grief.

Falling into love is grief.

Becoming a parent is grief.

Not becoming one is grief.

Changing careers, losing meaning, gaining insight, losing illusions, realizing you can’t go back, realizing you have to go back — all of this and more demands grief!

Life itself continuously asks us to let something die so something else can live.

And instead of meeting this as a sacred rhythm of existence, we and the society we created, treat it to often like a malfunction.

If grief were taken seriously ; not romantically, not sentimentally, but in all its honestly and importance ; it would not be a problem to solve or a state to get out of, but a way of celebrating life through:

- metabolizing and growing into change instead of resisting it,

- staying alive and evolving instead of freezing into outdated versions of ourselves.

But we don’t do that.

We only recognize one form of grief: death.

and even then, barely...

We allow a small window of sadness, a few rituals, a handful of socially acceptable tears ; and then... we expect closure, resilience, productivity and a return back to normality (whatever that means).

Everything else: the grief around identity collapse, the existential emptiness, the nervous system overwhelm, loss of meaning, loss of future, loss of safety, etc, we have either forgotten, we ignore, minimize or worse we medicalize.

If there is no body to bury, we don’t know anymore what to do.

So we rename grief:

We call it chronic fatigue when the system metabolizes for "too Long according to the norms".

We call it burnout when the body refuses to continue.

We call it anxiety when the nervous system loses its reference points.

We call it dysfunction when someone can’t return to the life that no longer fits.

We call it depression when the mind encounters emptiness and darkness.

And then we try to get people out of it as fast as possible!

We do this socially.

We do this professionally.

We do this to each other.

And we do this to ourselves.

---

The Subtle Violence We Participate In

This is not the fault of some abstract system.

There is no invisible enemy here.

This is a collective failure of capacity.

We have lost the ability to stay present with what is slow, messy, unproductive, and disorienting.

We have lost the patience to sit with someone who is dissolving rather than improving.

We have lost the language to say, "something important is dying here — let’s not interrupt it."

So instead, we push and try to fix!

We encourage positivity.

We offer solutions.

We demand meaning too early.

We praise resilience when what is actually needed is collapse.

And when someone cannot comply, we subtly withdraw,

we become uncomfortable.

Or we suggest help, which is really just a polite way of saying: Please change.

This does not come frome cruelty.

It comes from fear.

We rush people out of grief because we do not know how to stay with our own.

---

When Grief Has No Place, It Becomes Pathology

Grief that is not allowed to complete itself , and in its own rythm, does not disappear ... It moves underground.

It becomes chronic anxiety.

Emotional numbness.

Compulsive busyness.

Addiction.

Endless self-improvement.

Relationships that never touch depth.

Lives that look successful but feel strangely hollow.

This is not because people are broken.

It is because something that needed to die was never allowed to finish dying.

Grief is not a mistake in the system.

It is the system reorganizing around truth.

---

Before We Were Modern — Without Romanticizing It

This is not a call to return to some idealized tribal past.

Tribal life was harsh, violent, uncertain, and unforgiving.

But there was something fundamental we have now lost:

Grief had context and was inherently part of life.

When someone broke — not only from death, but from loss of role, loss of relationship, loss of status, loss of meaning — they were not immediately reintegrated into normal functioning.

They were pulled out of the flow.

Held at the edges.

Fed.

Watched.

Protected.

Loved exactly as they where.

Their disorientation was not seen nor treated as illness.

It was understood as initiation into life.

Grief marked the crossing from one identity to another.

You were not expected to come back the same.

We, on the other hand, expect continuity where none exists.

---

The Body Knows What the Culture Refuses to Admit

Existential grief is not primarily psychological.

It is biological, relational, and somatic.

The nervous system loses safety because its reference points are gone.

The body contracts because it does not yet know how to live in what comes next.

The future disappears because it was built on assumptions that no longer exist.

Of course panic appears.

Of course emptiness comes.

Of course despair rises.

Of course the body contracts.

This is not sickness.

This is truth moving through the body faster than the mind can organize meaning.

---

What We Actually Need — And Rarely Offer

Grieving people do not need to be fixed.

They do not need to be motivated.

They do not need ever-present optimism.

They need space.

Time.

Slowness.

And non-abandonment.

They need permission to not know where or who they are yet.

To not perform healing.

To not be inspirational.

To not be okay.

They need others who can stay without trying to rescue them from their own becoming.

And that kind of presence is rare , because it requires us to stay in contact with our own unfinished grief.

---

This Is Not About Staying in Pain

This is not a manifesto for suffering.

This is not an argument for stagnation into pain and darkness.

This is a reminder that some transformations cannot be rushed without being betrayed.

Grief is not only linked to the end of physical life.

It is what happens when life demands honesty.

Until we relearn how to hold grief ; not only physical death-grief, but existential grief, relational grief, identity grief, etc. ;

we will keep producing functional humans who feel dead inside.

And we will keep calling that normal.

---

We are not broken.

We are unfinished.

And grief is not asking to be eliminated.

It is asking to be met and invited.

If this acticle unsettles you, good!

It means something alive is listening.

We don’t need better coping strategies.

We need a culture that remembers how to let somethings die — fully.

Only then does anything new have a chance to live.

Written by Ruben, cleaned up with AI (in all honesty)