The Age of Pre-Grief

We're mourning the future before it arrives.

May 25, 2025

I’ve been noticing it in small moments. The way I linger in doorways. The way I watch my partner sleep. The way I hold old photographs longer than I mean to. Nothing’s happened. No one’s gone. But some part of me is already grieving. In preparation.

You might be feeling it too—that low ache under everything. Like you’re already grieving something, but can’t say what. Not just burnout. Not quite anxiety. Something quieter. Sharper. We’re not grieving the past—we’re grieving the future. The parent still alive. The world still standing.

The version of life that hasn’t disappeared, but feels like it will. So we start detaching early. Some might call it realism. But maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s pre-grief.

Naming the Ache

Pre-grief isn’t a diagnosis. It doesn’t come with stages or rituals. It’s not loud like mourning or sharp like shock. It’s slower, lower, more private. A kind of emotional bracing—a way of pulling back before life can take something from you. You don’t cry. You just stop getting too close. It shows up as distance, numbness, loneliness—the quiet suspicion that nothing good can stay.

It’s not irrational to prepare for loss. But preparation becomes habit. Habit becomes worldview. The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard called it the dizziness of freedom1—that lurching feeling when you realise just how many outcomes are possible, and how few you can control. Anxiety, in his view, wasn’t about specific fears. It was the weight of imagining every way something could go wrong.

Pre-grief grows from that same root. It’s what happens when our awareness of fragility becomes emotional habit—when we trade living for the illusion of control, trying to outpace loss before it finds us.

That imagined ending becomes a lens, then a posture, then a permanent stance.

A World Already Slipping Away

You can see it in how we think about the planet.

A 2021 Lancet study surveyed 10,000 young people across ten countries: nearly 60% said they were very or extremely worried about climate change.2 More than half said it made them feel helpless, sad, or doomed. That’s not just fear—it’s mourning in motion. Mourning for ecosystems already collapsing, but also for futures we no longer trust enough to imagine.

For many, that grief is already shaping daily life. Not as protest, but as resignation. A kind of slow, ambient loss woven into the fabric of waking up.

It’s there in the choices we make, too. A third of Americans under 50 who don’t plan to have children blame climate collapse, political instability, or economic precarity.3 These aren’t just practical concerns—they’re existential. When the future feels untrustworthy, we stop investing in it.

Pre-grief doesn’t just shape our moods. It shapes the architecture of our lives. Instead of picturing what we’ll build, we rehearse what we might lose. And so we don’t begin.

Searching for Language

Sometimes, the first place we look for meaning is a search bar.

Type everything feels and Google rushes to finish the thought: heavy, pointless, overwhelming, like a dream. It’s a quiet archive of private grief, sitting just beneath the surface of ordinary life. Not a call for advice. Not even a search for answers. Just a collective reaching for language.

We’re not grieving what’s gone. We’re trying to name the ache of holding what still exists, knowing it won’t last. What we want—more than comfort—is a framework. A way to hold the feeling without being crushed by it. A way to live inside the uncertainty that has always been ours.

Naming it feels like power. If we can give it a shape, maybe we can carry it. Ambiguous loss. Shadow work. Inner child grief. Nervous system regulation. The frameworks multiply—some helpful, some hollow—as we try to make sense of an ache we were never taught to name.

Our fragility has become a consumer market. Global wellness—now worth over $1.5 trillion4—is built as much on bracing for trauma as healing from it. Brands sell weighted blankets for sleep, supplements for “emotional resilience,” apps for breathwork, and kits for breakup recovery. What started as self-soothing has hardened into a soft panic industry: a thousand ways to rehearse pain we haven’t yet lived. We’re not just trying to survive grief anymore. We’re trying to preempt it.

The Cost of Pre-Grief

The cultural theorist Lauren Berlant calls it cruel optimism5—the idea that the things we reach for to survive are often the very things that hollow us out. Hope, turned toxic. But what we’re living with now feels sharper, sadder: cruel realism. A quiet conviction that getting too attached is foolish. That it’s smarter to mourn things before they can hurt us.

Pre-grief offers the promise of safety: we leave before we’re left, we grieve before we’re gone. We brace against what might be taken, forgetting that absence begins the moment we stop reaching. Grief rehearsed is still grief lived. And when you start grieving what you still have, you stop inhabiting it.

Pre-grief hollows out presence. In friendships, it looks like distance you can’t articulate or explain. In work, like ambition dulled before it even begins. In love, like holding back tenderness to soften a future blow.

You end up haunting your own life, braced for an impact that hasn’t come yet. Kierkegaard warned that despair isn’t just the feeling of losing something—it’s the feeling of being absent from your own existence.

The answer isn’t to pretend we’re safe. And it isn’t to live halfway out the door. There’s no shield against loss that doesn’t also blunt joy.

What’s left is something quieter, harder, more radical: to stay. To stay inside the life you have, even knowing it won’t last. To let go of control, and choose presence instead. To let yourself love the things you’re bound to lose. Not optimism; not nihilism. Instead, attention; cultivation.

It’s the daily, stubborn act of being present while you still can.

Thanks for reading Global Natives. If you enjoyed this essay, consider sharing it with a friend—or with a community that might enjoy it too.

Søren Kierkegaard describes anxiety as “the dizziness of freedom” in The Concept of Anxiety (1844), linking it to the overwhelming awareness of possibility.

Hickman, Caroline et al. (2021). “Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: a global survey.” The Lancet Planetary Health, 5(12): e863–e873.

Pew Research Center, “About Four-in-Ten U.S. Adults Under 50 Without Kids Say They Don’t Expect to Ever Have Them” (2021).

McKinsey & Company, “The future of wellness” (2021).

Lauren Berlant coined the term “cruel optimism” in Cruel Optimism (2011) to describe attachments that sustain us but simultaneously block our flourishing.