It’s hard to live with your heart cracked open to everything. It wears you down. Feeling helpless or overwhelmed by negativity is not a pleasant place to be. But this kind of escape, while fully within a person’s right, is both shortsighted, impossible for most, and unlikely to lead to the happy space they’re so desperate to create. It’s a hopeful fiction: that joy can thrive in isolation, that you can build a sanctuary sealed off from the storm. Unless you’re completely shutting out the world—which, frankly, requires a level of privilege or moving into the woods, maybe both—you will inevitably be drawn back into conversation, contradiction, complexity.