Life Goes On?
We've all heard it a thousand times: "Life goes on." It's what people say when something terrible happens. Your heart breaks, you lose someone, you fail at something important, and everyone assures you that time heals all wounds, that you'll bounce back, that things will get better.
And in some ways, they're right. Six months after a breakup, you're not crying in the shower anymore or shouting at railway stations. A year after losing a job, you've found a new one. The sharp edges of grief do seem to dull with time.
But here's a question that keeps me up at night: Do our problems actually get smaller, or do we just get used to carrying them?
The Brain's Beautiful Lie:
There's something I recently read, psychologists call it the "Fading Affect Bias." It's a fancy name for something we all experience: negative memories lose their emotional sting faster than positive ones.
Remember that humiliating moment in high school? You can tell the story now without wanting to crawl under a table. That's your brain doing you a favor, separating the facts of what happened from the feeling of what happened. It's like your mind gently removes the hot coals from your hands and leaves you holding the ashes instead.
This is how "life goes on" actually works. Your brain actively tries to help you move forward by turning down the volume on old pain. It creates the illusion that the problem has become smaller.
But here's the thing: this system doesn't work for everyone. If you're depressed, if trauma has rewired your circuits, if you're just built differently, those memories don't fade. They stay vivid and sharp, like they happened yesterday. For some people, the past doesn't become past. It remains in their present all the time, crowding out the room you need to breathe.
For them, problems don't become smaller. They pile up.
What Your Body Remembers:
Even when your mind forgets, your body keeps score.
Scientists have this term: "allostatic load." It's the wear and tear on your body from chronic stress. Think of it like this, every time something stressful happens, your body goes into emergency mode. Heart rate up, cortisol flooding your system, all hands on deck. That's fine for short bursts. That's what it's designed for.
But what happens when the emergency never really ends? When you're always worried about money, or lonely, or just trying to survive in a world that feels hostile? Your body stays in emergency mode. And that has consequences.
The stress doesn't just disappear because you've "moved on." It gets stored, in your blood pressure, in your immune system, in the way your cells age. Scientists studying marginalized communities have a word for this: "weathering." Like a cliff face constantly battered by storms, people wear down from the inside.
So yes, you might think you've gotten over something. You might not consciously feel the weight anymore. But your body hasn't forgotten. The burden is still there, it's just been absorbed into your bones, your arteries, your DNA.
The pile-up is happening whether you notice it or not.
When "Stay Positive" Becomes Another Weight:
There's something cruel about how we talk about resilience in our culture. We celebrate people who "bounce back." We admire those who don't let things get them down. We say things like "Everything happens for a reason" and "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."
But what about when it doesn't? What about when you're still struggling and everyone around you has moved on? What about when you can't match the timeline society has set for your healing?
This pressure to perform recovery, to pretend you're okay before you actually are, becomes its own burden. You're not just carrying the original pain; now you're also carrying the shame of not carrying it well enough. You're exhausted from the grief and from hiding the grief.
The message "life goes on" can feel less like comfort and more like a command. Keep up. Move forward. Don't be a burden to others with your sadness.
But real trauma doesn't work on a schedule. It's messy and cyclical. You think you're fine, then something small triggers you and you're back at square one. The "madness" of grief is that it doesn't make sense, doesn't follow rules, doesn't care about your productivity or your social obligations.
The Philosopher Who Said Life Is Suffering (And He Wasn't Wrong):
Arthur Schopenhauer, a 19th-century German philosopher, had a bleak view of existence. He believed life was essentially an endless cycle of wanting, getting, wanting again.
Think about it: You're hungry, so you eat. Satisfied for a moment. Then hungry again. You're lonely, so you find connection. Happy briefly. Then lonely again. You solve one problem, feel relief, then immediately face the next problem.
Schopenhauer said life "swings like a pendulum between pain and boredom." We're either suffering from unmet needs or we're bored because our needs are temporarily met. There's no lasting peace, only brief pauses between struggles.
This sounds depressing, but it explains something important: why solving our problems doesn't make us lastingly happy. It's not that we're doing it wrong. It's that the structure of life itself generates problems as fast as we can solve them.
The "piling up" isn't a failure of resilience. It's the natural state of being alive and conscious. Each solved problem just clears space for the next burden.
The Weight of Simply Being Awake:
Emil Cioran, a Romanian philosopher, in his book 'the trouble with being born' wrote beautifully about the exhaustion of consciousness itself. He struggled with insomnia, and in those long, dark hours, he discovered something: when you can't sleep, time doesn't flow normally. It accumulates. Every worry, every regret, every anxiety from your entire life crowds into the room with you.
For the insomniac, the past doesn't fade, it hovers, tangible and suffocating.
But Cioran found something paradoxical: the thought of suicide was actually life-sustaining for him. Not because he wanted to die, but because knowing he could leave made staying bearable. "Without the idea of suicide," he wrote, "I would have killed myself always."
The exit door doesn't have to be used. Just knowing it's there makes the room feel less like a trap.
This is what he meant by death being a "saviour." Not that we should seek it, but that its inevitability provides relief, a promise that the accumulation has a limit and perhaps a beautiful end.
Stories That Show Us What Words Can't:
Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet, described a weariness that wasn't physical but existential. "I am tired of myself in every way," he wrote. Not tired from work or exercise, but tired of being.
He captured something true about long-term burden: it doesn't just sit on top of you. It seeps into you, becomes you. The dust settles on your soul until you can't tell where the original self ends and the accumulated weight begins.
Virginia Woolf gave us Rhoda in The Waves, a character who feels the full force of existence without any protective buffer. "I have no face," Rhoda says, overwhelmed by the multiplicity of the world. She experiences what most of us are shielded from: the raw accumulation of sensory and emotional data, piling up faster than consciousness can process it.
Rhoda longs to dissolve, to let the waves roll over her and finally stop fighting to maintain a separate self.
Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich is dying, but everyone around him pretends he's just temporarily ill. They urge him to take his medicine, to be cheerful, to maintain normalcy. This cheerful denial becomes its own torture.
Only when Ivan stops pretending, stops participating in the lie of "life goes on," does he find peace. In his final moments, he realizes death isn't the end of him, it's the end of the burden.
The Symmetry of Darkness:
Here's a thought experiment from the ancient philosopher Lucretius:
Think about the billions of years before you were born. The entire history of the universe unfolding without you. Does that time fill you with dread? Do you feel you missed out on something?
Probably not. That non-existence seems neutral, even peaceful.
Now think about the time after your death. The years and centuries that will unfold without you. Logically, shouldn't this feel the same as the time before you were born?
Vladimir Nabokov put it beautifully: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."
If life is the "crack of light" where all the accumulation happens, where we must carry the weight of consciousness, memory, and striving, then the darkness is where we don't have to carry anything at all.
The darkness isn't punishment. It's rest.
Immortality:
Imagine if you had to live forever. Truly forever. Not just centuries, but millennia, eons, until the stars burn out.
At first, it might seem appealing. More time to learn, to love, to experience things. But think about the accumulation: ten thousand years of losses. Ten thousand years of goodbyes. Ten thousand years of mistakes you can't undo, regrets that don't fade, sorrows that pile higher and higher.
Your brain would eventually break under the weight. Memory would become a curse. The "Fading Affect Bias" would fail, there's only so much pain a mind can metabolize. Identity would shatter. You wouldn't be human anymore. You'd be something else, a consciousness so fractured by accumulated trauma that "madness" might be too kind a word.
Death saves us from this. It's not a bug in the system; it's a feature. It's the mercy built into existence, the guarantee that no matter how heavy the burden gets, you won't have to carry it forever.
The Beautiful Message:
So where does this leave us?
Yes, life goes on. The sun rises even after the worst day of your life. You get out of bed. You make coffee. You put one foot in front of the other. This is real, and it matters.
But also yes, problems pile up. You don't forget the hard things; you grow around them like a tree growing around a fence post. They become part of your structure. Some wounds don't heal, they just become scars you learn to live with. This is also real, and it also matters.
Both things are true.
The brain tries to lighten the load through the beautiful fiction of fading memories. The body carries the truth in its bones. We are weathered by what we endure, shaped by storms we survived, defined by the weight we've carried.
But here's the comfort: the road isn't infinite.
You don't have to carry this forever. Just for now. Just for your lifetime, this one brief, specific, finite human life.
The "madness" is held at bay by knowing there's an end. We can bear the accumulation because we know the weight has a limit. We can stay in the room because we know the door exists.
Death isn't a failure or a tragedy in this view. It's the completion. The moment when all the things you've been carrying are finally set down. The return to the quiet, neutral state from which you came.
Living With the Weight:
This doesn't mean we should be passive or nihilistic. It doesn't mean nothing matters because we're all going to die anyway.
It means the opposite: because we only have to carry this burden for a limited time, we can choose what we do with the strength we have. We can decide which weights are worth carrying and which we can set down. We can be honest about the heaviness instead of pretending it's light. We can stop performing resilience we don't feel.
And we can be gentler with ourselves and each other. Because if problems do pile up, if the burden is real and doesn't just vanish with positive thinking, then maybe compassion is more useful than inspiration. Maybe "I see how heavy that is" means more than "It'll get better soon."
The Spark of Light:
Your life is that one little spark of light between two ends of darknesses. It's brief. It's burdened. The problems do pile up, and you do carry them until you don't have to anymore.
But it's also precious precisely because it's temporary. The accumulation only matters because consciousness matters. The weight only hurts because you're alive to feel it.
And when it's finally too much, when the allostatic load has weathered you down to your foundation, when the sediment of experience has layered too deep, there's an end. Not as a punishment, but as a rest. Not as a failure, but as a completion.
You don't have to carry it forever.
You only have to carry it now.
And somehow, knowing that makes now just a little bit more bearable.
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