The Map I Wish I Had: Touching The Zeitgeist In July 2025

1. The Return of the Brain That Thinks Too Much

I’ve recently come through a difficult patch with my mental health—a stretch where everything felt heavy, muffled, and out of reach. During that time, I was prescribed medication that may have helped stabilise things, but it also made it harder to connect with my inner world. The thinking part of me—the part that questions, connects, wonders—felt numbed.

Now, as I begin to recover, I’m noticing the return of that inner spark. My thoughts are back—not chaotic or overwhelming, but curious, persistent, and tuned in to the deeper patterns of life. It’s intense, yes. But it also feels like clarity.

And I’ve started wondering: what if this way of thinking—the relentless reflection, the noticing, the big-picture awareness—isn’t the thing I need to suppress, but something worth protecting? Worth listening to?

2. What Happens When You Ask the Questions No One Has Time to Ask?

One night recently, in the middle of this recovery, I sat down and asked myself: what are people really thinking about right now? What are the questions that haunt us, consciously or not?

The list that came out of me wasn’t tidy. It wasn’t strategic. It was a flood. Forty questions that touched everything from climate grief to economic instability, from digital overload to existential dread. Not as abstract philosophy, but as felt reality.

Questions like:

• What if I can’t afford to live, but I also can’t afford to stop?

• What if distraction is my only coping mechanism?

• How do I live ethically when every choice has a cost I can’t fully see?

• What happens to a nervous system raised online?

• Is it still possible to find meaning without spiritual bypassing?

Reading them back, I felt two things simultaneously: absolute overwhelm, and total clarity. These weren’t just my questions. They were the questions.

Being me, I immediately started questioning whether it was just me, or did we all feel this way? A poke around google trends (with a lot of help from chat gpt) and I came up with the 40 biggest questions we are all asking ourselves (or our smart phones, at any rate) right now.

So I made them into a free companion guide:
🎁 Download “40 Questions for the World-Weary Mind” here

This isn’t just a list. It’s a mirror. A Modern Day Jungian-journal-style resource designed to help you uncover the collective unconscious through your own responses. Use them to journal, to breathe, to reconnect. You don’t need to answer them all—just notice which ones catch in your chest.

I honestly believe that these questions will be useful to everybody; irrelevant of location, age, occupation, class, gender, neurotype, and any of the other dividers we use to compartmentalise our big, sprawling, messy world. During this post I am going to explain why.

3. We Are the Edge Species (and Our Brains Know It)

I’ve come to believe that people like me—neurodivergent, emotionally attuned, often overwhelmed—aren’t maladaptive. We’re responsive. Maybe even necessary.

In a world teetering on the edge of multiple crises, it makes sense that some brains would light up with urgency. That some people would feel the noise, the contradictions, the pain, more intensely. We’re not disordered. We’re a mirror. Maybe even a warning system. Maybe even the beginning of something new.

The existential psychotherapists understood this. So did Jung. He saw the unconscious not as chaos, but as a language of symbols and signals trying to help us metabolise our time in history.

So I’ve been thinking: what if we need a new framework? Not another productivity system—but something that helps us map our place in the soul-weather of 2025.

4. We Need a Framework, Not a Diagnosis

I’m calling it The Map I Wish I Had.

It’s part Jungian symbol map, part existential compass, part creative ritual. It explores six dimensions:

1. The Symbolic – What image matches this emotion?

2. The Existential – What core human tension is being touched?

3. The Collective – What’s happening in the emotional body of culture?

4. The Creative – What wants to be made from this feeling?

5. The Somatic/Imaginal – Where does this live in the body, and what image belongs there?

6. The Transcendent (but Grounded) – What soul-sized view lets this make sense without bypassing it?

Of course - any of you that have been with me since Mindful Canvas Digital, will know that this is the framework that has always shaped my blog posts, printables, resources—even card decks.

This is the heart of what Creative Therapy Printables is really about. Not productivity. Not aesthetic self-help. But soul navigation.

5. Affirmation for Brains That Think Too Much (a little ND entertainment break)

To the ones who think too much…

You are not broken. You are not weak. You are not failing to cope.

You are correctly responding to a world vibrating with uncertainty, contradiction, and transformation. Your thoughts are trying to metabolise what can’t be digested. That is not madness. That is sensitivity. That is evolution.

History is full of minds like yours: – Leonardo da Vinci – Alan Turing – Albert Einstein – Emily Dickinson – Temple Grandin – Hannah Gadsby – Greta Thunberg – Satoshi Tajiri (creator of Pokémon)

Your mind is a map of tomorrow. Even if it looks like chaos now.

6. You’re Not Alone on This Edge

I know some of you have Amazon baskets full of things you really don’t need right now, that might be imported from the other side of the world, leaving a massive carbon footprint. So do I. It’s shit, isn’t it? The guilt… I know you scroll when you’re anxious, even though you know it’s making it worse. Me too… I know you use AI, even though you know about it’s environmental impact. I absolutely rely on it as my ever ready PA… I know you feel conflicted about everything that makes your life more comfortable nowadays. The grocery deliveries, and streaming services, and the 5G and the several pairs of trainers for every different type of exursion out of the house tht we relly never need to leave any more… I know you’re addicted and aware and grieving and overwhelmed all at once.

Same.

We’re not broken. We’re early.

We need more than tips and to-do lists—we need emotional cartography. And we need one another.

So here’s a place to begin:
🌀 Download the free “40 Questions for the World-Weary Mind” PDF – a reflective, symbolic tool for exploring our shared psychological landscape in this moment.

What’s the one question your brain won’t stop asking lately?
Write it down. Sit with it. It might just be your compass.