The Beatles said it. Various spiritual traditions have said it for thousands of years. And somewhere between the noise of the news cycle, the doomscrolling, and the low hum of general existential anxiety that seems to define modern life — I keep coming back to the same thought. What if they were right? What if love really is the answer?
I don't mean that in a naive way. I'm not suggesting we stick flowers in rifle barrels and hope for the best. What I mean is something more specific, and I think more useful. We are — each of us — units of consciousness experiencing this strange, brief, material life on earth. And what if the mission, the actual reason we are here, is to feel love? To feel connected to the world, to one another, to something bigger than the fear that the morning headlines are trying to sell us?
Because here is what I notice. When I am in a place of love — when I feel genuine warmth toward the people around me, when I feel that chest-expanding sense of connection — there is simply no room for the other stuff. Not the anger, not the anxiety, not the low-grade paranoia that modern life seems specifically engineered to produce. Love doesn't just feel good. It crowds the other things out.
The Conspiracy — and I Mean That Seriously
Let me say something that might sound strange coming from someone who runs a digital identity company and spends a lot of time thinking about technology and systems. I think there is a conspiracy against love. Not a shadowy room of men with a whiteboard, necessarily. But a structural conspiracy. An architecture of distraction built specifically to keep us in a state of low-level fear.
Think about what modern media — social and otherwise — is actually optimised for. Not information. Not connection. Outrage. Fear. The feeling that something is always wrong, that we are always under threat, that the world is precarious and getting more so. Because that feeling keeps us engaged. It keeps us scrolling. And a person who is scrolling, anxious, reactive — that person is not a person who is feeling love. They are a person whose nervous system has essentially been hijacked.
When we are in survival mode — when the amygdala is running the show — empathy and genuine connection take a back seat. We contract. We pull inward. We protect. Which is the exact opposite of what I think we are actually here to do. Because pushing love outward — putting it into the world, making it visible, making other people feel it — requires openness. It requires a kind of deliberate vulnerability that is very hard to sustain when everything around you is designed to make you feel unsafe.
Hate is not the opposite of love. It is what love looks like when it has been frightened for too long.
I think that is worth sitting with. Because it changes the frame. If hate is fear in disguise, then fighting hate by meeting it with more force, more outrage, more noise, is actually just feeding the original problem. You are adding to the fear. And what the world needs, what I think you and I need, is not more volume. It is more warmth.
You Cannot Fill What is Already Full
There is a simple principle at work here that I find genuinely useful as a practical matter. A vessel that is full of love has no room for hate. Not because hate was defeated — but because it was displaced. Made irrelevant. Given no audience.
The mistake most of us make, myself included, is thinking that we need to remove the negative stuff before we can let the good stuff in. We wait to feel better before we start trying to connect. We wait for the world to quieten down before we allow ourselves to feel warmth. But it does not work that way. You do not empty the vessel first. You fill it. And the filling is what does the emptying.
This sounds like philosophy, and it is — but it is also just neuroscience. You cannot sustain two contradictory emotional states simultaneously at full intensity. When you genuinely choose to focus on gratitude, on warmth, on connection with the person in front of you — the noise recedes. Not because it disappeared. But because your attention moved, and attention is everything.
The Practice. Because This is Not a Feeling — It is a Discipline.
Here is where I want to be practical, because love as an abstract idea does very little. Love as a daily practice — that is where it gets interesting.
I am not naturally a morning person. But I have learned that the first few minutes after waking are crucial — not because of some productivity hack, but because your defences are down. Before the phone, before the news, before the calendar — there is a window where you can actually choose your orientation for the day. And the question I try to ask myself in that window is not what do I need to do today, but what do I want to feel today, and who do I want to direct that feeling toward.
It sounds small. It is small. But small things done consistently are the only things that actually change anything. Because the practice of love — feeling it, expressing it, pushing it outward — is exactly that. A practice. Not a state you arrive at permanently. Not a mood that descends on you when conditions are right. A deliberate, daily, sometimes inconvenient choice to orient yourself toward warmth rather than toward fear.
Your weapon of choice matters less than you think. Meditation works for some people. For others it is exercise, or prayer, or a long walk without headphones. What matters is that you have something — some ritual, some moment — that brings you back to the baseline of connection rather than the baseline of reaction. Because the world will always try to set your baseline for you. The news will try. Social media will try. Even well-meaning people around you will try. The practice is the act of saying: no, I am setting this myself.
Love is a muscle, not a reservoir. You do not wait to feel full before you give it. The giving is what fills you.
Love as Rebellion
If there is a system designed to keep you small, frightened, and disconnected — then being generous with your love is the most subversive thing you can do. It is not passive. It is not soft. It is a direct and deliberate refusal to participate in the architecture of fear.
When you hold eye contact with a stranger instead of looking at your phone. When you actually listen to someone — not waiting for your turn to speak, but genuinely listening. When you say what you feel instead of performing what is expected. When you choose, in a small but real way, to push love outward rather than to hold it in where it is safe — you are doing something radical. You are changing the frequency around you. And frequencies are contagious.
I do not know if the universe is conscious or if there is some grand design behind the fact that we are here, experiencing this. But I do know that the moments in my life that have felt most real — most alive — have been moments of genuine connection. Of love, felt and expressed. And I find it very hard to believe that is an accident.
So yes. I think love is the answer. Not as a bumper sticker. Not as a sentimental retreat from reality. But as a practice. As a discipline. As a daily act of rebellion against everything that wants to keep you in your chest instead of putting your heart into the world.
Start tomorrow morning. Before the phone. Before the news. Before the noise.
Just feel it. And then push it out.