The World Is Too Much With Us

There was a time when the world didn’t feel so close to our faces.

News arrived more slowly. Expectations had edges. There wasn’t constant noise paired with constant tragedy. The struggle was real, but it lived in the newsroom, not in our pockets, not on our nightstands, not beside us while we tried to sleep.

Things were simpler, not because life was easy, but because it was contained. Hard moments had room to breathe. Ordinary days weren’t constantly interrupted by the knowledge of everything else happening everywhere all at once.

Now, the noise is relentless. The comparison constant. The demands feel closer, louder, more personal. Even rest has become something to optimize.

We are not imagining this.

This closeness without community, this constant nearness of everything, has consequences we can no longer pretend are abstract. It has undeniably brought more anxiety into everyday life. More sedentary living while our minds race. Less natural movement. Less unforced community.

Many of us feel a quiet disinterest in the real-world hobbies that once anchored us, not because we don’t care, but because we’re tired. Overstimulated. Pulled outward so often that we’ve lost touch with what draws us inward.

Somewhere along the way, the inner life became unfamiliar. We scroll past ourselves. We fill the space before we ever notice it’s empty. And the question of who we are beneath the noise goes unasked, not out of neglect, but out of exhaustion.

The Shop Purple Umbrella offering was created to meet you in different moments, as a place to begin, and as something you can return to. 

Some days it’s an experiment. Other days, it becomes a familiar rhythm. There is no prescribed way to use it, no ideal version to reach.

Choose what serves you today. Adapt it to your life as it is. Let it change with you. Let it be something you live with, not something you complete.

You don’t need to escape the world.

You just need a place where it asks a little less of you.