The strain many of us are carrying right now

I’m coming across women who are navigating so much right now.

Some are unpartnered, largely content, but exhausted by having to manage everything alone. Life admin, work, money, health, ageing bodies. Even with loving friends and family, the constancy of responsibility and decision making never really lets up.

Some are partnered, with kind, supportive men and still feel stretched thin, holding ageing parents, children growing up in a volatile world, homes that need constant tending. Love is present. But so is the load.

Some are partnered with men who are emotionally unavailable or unwilling to grow, and find themselves quietly wishing they were single.

Women have always carried more responsibility in the world. But what feels different now is the environment they’re carrying it in.

Bodies running on poor sleep and food that no longer nourishes in the same way. Nervous systems shaped by constant digital stimulation and very little real rest. Lives lived inside deteriorating physical environments– polluted air, disrupted seasons, hormonal strain– and psychological ones, saturated with distressing news, misinformation, and a sense of permanent urgency.

Add to that financial uncertainty and technological change moving faster than people can emotionally integrate. Many are carrying responsibilities on a ground that is no longer steady, socially, economically, or biologically, without having been given time, language, or collective support to adapt.

This is where I start to see the larger pattern.

Women have historically compensated when systems strain– emotionally, relationally, domestically. And in this moment, that compensation is reaching its limits.

And men are not outside this picture. This strain is held by men too who are moving through the same terrain, with a different inheritance. What I’m seeing there isn’t cruelty or indifference. It is exhaustion mixed with disorientation. A quiet sense of having lost the map while still being expected to lead.

Men are also living on this unsteady ground, under relentless performance pressure and economic uncertainty, in work that no longer guarantees security and sometimes dignity. Bodies short on rest, movement, and touch. Nervous systems stretched thin, with very few sanctioned places to recover or fall apart.

Layered onto this is a legacy that taught men how to endure, but not how to stay, responsibility without relational skill, provision without emotional fluency, strength without language for inner life. Many are trying to meet a moment that now requires presence and adaptability with tools that were built for survival, not connection.

As women increasingly say no to emotional unavailability and unequal relational labour, a refusal that feels necessary, many men are left unmoored, unsure how to orient themselves without the old arrangements.

When men struggle to regulate themselves, physically, emotionally, relationally, presence becomes harder to sustain. In response, women move into alertness, capability, control. The cost is subtle but significant– women remain braced, and the softer, generative qualities they naturally bring are gradually edged out. This is how systemic imbalance takes root.

So I’m sitting with this: we may be asking human capacity to stretch beyond what it was ever designed to hold, while leaving the surrounding systems largely unchanged. When pressure accumulates faster than support, individuals compensate, until they can’t.

I don’t experience this as a story of blame or failure. I experience it as a transitional moment, one where existing models of leadership, partnership, and responsibility are no longer sufficient for the conditions we’re living in.

This inquiry is shaping how I think about the spaces people actually need now, not as retreats from reality, but as structural supports. Spaces where nervous systems can settle, perspective can return, and new ways of relating and leading can begin to take form together.