26/01/2026
On Collective Fatigue, Discernment, and What’s Being Asked of Us Now
There is a deep fatigue moving through the collective right now.
Not the kind that comes from overwork or busyness,
but a more profound exhaustion — the kind that follows years of psychic saturation.
For a long time, reality has been lived through fog.
Meaning has been softened, distorted, endlessly reframed.
Truth hasn’t disappeared, but it has struggled to stay anchored.
We have not simply consumed information —
we have lived inside it.
It’s now all about discerning propaganda, spiritual courage, and the difference between being inspired and being led astray.
Emotional tone has travelled faster than facts currently...
Fear, hope, outrage, and salvation narratives have spread virally, often detached from real-world consequences.
Coherence mattered less than repetition, affect, and scale.
Polarisation became one of the primary organising forces of this era — not always through overt control, but through emotional sorting.
People were nudged into silos shaped by what they liked, shared, feared, and defended.
Inside those silos, agreement felt like safety.
Outside them, difference felt like threat.
The result was not true plurality, but fragmentation — many languages spoken fluently, rarely translated.
One of the great promises of this period was connection.
In practice, that connection often arrived through shared crisis.
Pandemic fear.
Climate dread.
Moral urgency.
A sense that everyone was implicated in everything, all the time.
Collective responsibility blurred into collective guilt.
And when guilt becomes ambient, it becomes easy to weaponise.
Compassion hardened.
Disagreement became suspect.
Silence became compliance — or betrayal — depending on which narrative held the microphone.
The shadow of this era was not only deception imposed from above,
but self-deception cultivated from within.
Many learned to confuse emotional intensity with moral clarity.
To outsource discernment to consensus.
To substitute righteousness for understanding.
Over time, this eroded trust — not only in institutions or systems,
but in one another, and eventually, in the self.
This is why the ending of this cycle does not feel triumphant.
It feels heavy.
It feels like depletion.
Like something has run too long, asked too much, and can no longer sustain its illusions.
The fog does not lift all at once.
It thins unevenly.
Shapes appear before paths do.
That moment can feel disorienting — because it asks for orientation, not reaction.
What is being asked of us now is not louder belief, faster certainty, or immediate action.
Belief without self-authorship becomes fanaticism.
Action without discernment becomes conscription into someone else’s fight.
The temptation in the next phase is to replace confusion with certainty too quickly —
to trade fog for fire without examining what the fire is being fed by.
Many will follow ideologies, leaders, and moral crusades that offer clarity without accountability.
The work ahead is slower.
More demanding.
And far more embodied.
It asks us to question whether the beliefs we are ready to fight for are truly ours —
or inherited emotional scripts we’ve never paused to examine.
This moment is less about recruiting others,
and more about reclaiming agency.
Less about persuading,
and more about pausing.
Slowing down becomes an act of resistance.
Contemplation becomes a form of courage.
In a world trained to react, choosing to see clearly is a radical stance.
What remains now is the task of discernment.
To separate empathy from manipulation.
Unity from conformity.
Meaning from mood.
The tide is turning.
The question is no longer what we believe —
but how consciously we choose to stand.
Astrologically, many are marking the closing chapter of Neptune in Pisces. In the body, it feels like the fog thinning.
Discernment begins in the nervous system, the key to your health and well being.
This is the work I hold in both private sessions and longer-term mentoring.
Inbox open for February
Love Jo xx
If you’re not sure how to work with me right now,�or you’re simply looking for a gentle place to land,�you may like to begin with my Healing Pod Meditations.
They’re immersive, nervous-system-led journeys created to support settling, integration, and inner coherence — without pressure or performance.
You can explore them here:�
https://raisingvibrations.com.au/the-healing-pod/