By Shamecca Brown, Columnist
There’s a heaviness settling over the world these days, and most people can feel it, even if they don’t want to admit it out loud. The news cycles are soaked in hate, cruelty and division. Social platforms reward outrage over empathy. Headlines read like warnings – another war, another shooting, another attack, another person stripped of dignity for simply existing.
People are growing numb. Not because they’ve stopped caring, but because caring has become exhausting. The human heart wasn’t designed for a constant drip of global suffering and personal struggle all at once.
And the coldness isn’t just happening out there, it’s happening in everyday interactions. In the rushed conversations. In the lack of eye contact. In the judgment before curiosity. Somewhere along the line, we stopped offering each other grace. We stopped assuming the best. We stopped acknowledging strangers as people with whole stories behind their faces.
But even in this frost, there are people who refuse to surrender their warmth. They’re not loud. They’re not trending. They’re not chasing applause or making speeches. They’re simply showing up. Showing up for their kids, for their neighbors, for communities that are hurting, and sometimes for people they don’t owe anything to at all.
They’re the resilient ones, the people who don’t let coldness dictate their character.
Resilience doesn’t mean pretending everything is fine. It doesn’t mean smiling through suffering or ignoring how bad things have gotten. It means acknowledging the darkness and choosing, stubbornly, to plant something good anyway. That’s a quiet resistance. A protest of the spirit.
Resilience shows up in how we show up for each other. I’ve seen it firsthand. When I lost someone I loved deeply, I expected the world to give me space and mind its own business, because that’s what we’ve been trained to do. Instead, my friends showed up. They stepped into my grief without hesitation. They checked on me, they fed my kids, they sat with me in silence. Not because they had the right words – nobody really does – but because they refused to let me drown alone.
That kind of presence rebuilds trust in humanity. It gives you air after you’ve forgotten how to breathe. It reminds you that, even in grief, even when life breaks in front of you, you are not abandoned. You learn that community is not just a concept. It’s a lifeline.
Showing up for someone in grief is not glamorous. There is no applause for it, no social media highlight reel. But it matters. It’s a statement that says, “I see you. I’m not leaving.” And in a cold world, that kind of warmth is hope in its purest form.
Learning to carry warmth
Some of the coldness that’s taken over society is rooted in fear – fear that resources are scarce, that vulnerability is weakness, that someone else’s joy or success is a threat. But the resilient know a different truth: Connection doesn’t shrink the world, it expands it.
What doesn’t get reported enough are the stories of people who are still choosing connection despite everything. Communities rebuilding after disaster. Teens organizing food drives. Survivors becoming advocates so someone else’s suffering isn’t wasted. Strangers forming human chains in emergencies. And yes, friends showing up to carry a grieving mother through the kind of loss that splits life into “before” and “after.”
These stories don’t cancel out the hate but they prove that humanity is not dead, just quieter.
The cold world wants you to believe that caring makes you naïve. But caring is not naïve; it’s revolutionary. It takes strength to stay soft when the world pushes you to harden. It takes courage to keep loving when bitterness would be easier. And it takes faith to believe that helping someone matters even when there’s no spotlight.
Maybe the work ahead isn’t about eliminating all the cold. Maybe it’s about learning how to carry warmth through it so others don’t freeze.
The world may be colder than it used to be, but it is not frozen. Not as long as resilient people exist – and they do. They’re everywhere. Some are loud about it, but most are quiet. Some are rebuilding communities, some are raising children, some are healing from things they don’t talk about, and some are simply choosing not to let hate win.
In a time like this, resilience isn’t just survival. It’s proof that humanity is still breathing.
Shamecca Brown is a New Hampshire-based columnist who is family-oriented and passionate about serving underserved communities. These articles are being shared by partners in the Granite State News Collaborative. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.