You ever just… look at it all? The whole impossible, crushing weight of it. You’re supposed to believe in something greater. Some grand design. A benevolent force. But then you’re sitting across from someone – someone who didn’t choose any of this – and their kids are hungry, again, because the system is designed to keep them there. And you’ve explained the paperwork, the eligibility, the waitlists for the third time this month. And you know, deep down, none of it will really change anything for them. Not fundamentally. Not the situation that put them there to begin with. And you think about what you were taught, what you were told about suffering, about purpose. And then you see the cyclical neglect, the inherited trauma, the sheer lack of resources that perpetuates it across generations in this city. You see the gaps. The unfillable holes. And it’s not just a lack of funding; it’s a systemic design flaw. A moral one. You’re supposed to find meaning in the little victories, the temporary interventions. But the overarching pattern is one of sustained, preventable degradation. And you’re just one person, a cog. So you go home, and your parents call, asking about your future, about marriage, about making them proud. And you just… you can’t. You’re numb. You’re detached. You're exhausted from trying to reconcile what you witness with what you’re supposed to feel, with what you’re supposed to believe. And you wonder if the exhaustion is just a symptom of a deeper cognitive dissonance, or if it's something else entirely. Something broken. You just don't know what to call it.