The unfortunate among us lost loved ones without as much as a proper goodbye. Yet others lost jobs, savings.

We all lost our sense of security.

The most fortunate merely lost a version of themselves.

It is 2025 now, and we tell ourselves we have moved on. But have we? Anxiety hums in the background. When heard closely, it’s a whispering presence we cannot shake off.

The oldest among us, our parents and grandparents, wonder what happened to work. They don’t understand why younger generations don’t go to the office as they once did. To them, work was a destination, a reason to wake up, dress up and step out. Now, they see their children hunched over laptops at kitchen tables and wonder if this is real work or an illusion.

They have seen wars and recessions, but this shapeless world confuses them.

For those in my generation, the ones who had built and nurtured companies and careers for decades before the world shut down, work is no longer what it was. At the peak of our careers, everything stopped. We were compelled to adjust and embrace “hybrid” work. We had to create new routines.

We live with quiet dread.

We know we are dispensable in ways we hadn’t imagined. Just the other day, I helped a friend polish his resume. He was recently laid off. In his early 50s, he knows it will be difficult to find the kind of position he so recently enjoyed.

Companies want younger, cheaper replacements. He doesn’t say he is scared. But I see it in the hesitation of his fingers over the keyboard, in the way he stares at nothing for too long.

And then there are the young ones, those who came of age amid the devastation of the virus. They were supposed to be invincible, the generation that would change the world. Instead, they were locked indoors, watching bodies pile up on TV, reading about friends’ parents dying alone, seeing hunger explode in the streets.

They learned too early that stability is a myth, and that nothing is permanent. Now, as they move forward, anxiety grips them in ways we don’t fully understand. Their jobs may be flexible and their opportunities global, but their nervous systems have been rewired for fear.

Urban India is reporting record levels of anxiety. We laugh, party, travel, but underneath it all, are terrified of losing everything overnight. Because we did, once. And while we all carry the weight of this unease, some shoulders bear more of the burden than others.

A Mental Health and Well-Being of School Students survey report released by NCERT (the National Council of Educational Research and Training) in 2022 indicated a rising prevalence of mental health concerns among adolescents exacerbated by the pandemic. 11% of students reported feeling anxious; 43% said they experience mood swings.

The pandemic rewrote the way we live, leaving behind a generation-spanning unease.

No one talks about it very much, but look carefully. Everyone hesitates before making long-term plans. There is an invisible bag of “what-ifs” we all carry. We pretend to have returned to normal. But normal is a place we can never fully go back to.

And so we live, moving forward but glancing back, holding on but bracing for impact, laughing but knowing, somewhere deep down, that the world will never feel completely safe again.

Perhaps there is something in this knowing. We have been broken and put back together differently.

Maybe our fragility is also our strength. Maybe confronting such loss makes us love more fiercely. Maybe knowing that security is an illusion makes us kinder to those who struggle.

There is no denying that the weight of uncertainty is heavy. But we carry it together. If we have learned anything, it is that we endure. Even with fear in our bones, even with worry clinging to our skin, we endure. We show up, we build, we care.

Maybe the way forward lies not in forgetting but in carrying the past carefully, like an old scar, a lesson learned, a quiet reminder to be gentle, with ourselves and with each other.

It is inevitable then that the closing lines of Vikram Seth’s poem resonate:

“The whole world shares your tears, /

Some for two nights or one, /

And some for all their years.”

(Charles Assisi is co-founder of Founding Fuel. He can be reached on assisi@foundingfuel.com)