Why Everything Feels Fragile Right Now

Something feels off.

Conversations escalate faster than they used to. Disagreements feel personal. Losing a job, a relationship, or even a sense of belonging seems to shatter people in ways that didn’t feel as common before. Even people who appear successful and stable often seem one bad moment away from collapse.

This isn’t just politics.
It isn’t just social media.
And it isn’t because people lack opportunity.

We live in one of the safest, most comfortable, most resource-rich periods in human history. And yet anxiety, outrage, and despair continue to rise.

That contradiction tells us something important.

The problem isn’t that people lack what they need.
The problem is that many of us have built our identity on things that were never meant to hold it.

What We Miss When We Only Talk About Needs

For decades, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has helped explain human motivation: food, safety, belonging, esteem, fulfillment. It’s a useful framework. It tells us what people require to survive and function.

But Maslow never asked a different, more dangerous question:

What happens when people confuse what they need with who they are?

Needs are temporary.
Identity is total.

When identity anchors to needs, fragility is inevitable.

If I am my comfort, then discomfort feels like a threat to my existence.
If I am my tribe, disagreement feels like attack.
If I am my success, failure feels like erasure.

When this happens, people don’t just react emotionally — they react existentially. Everything feels higher-stakes because everything feels personal.

Identity Anchors: What We Attach Ourselves To

Over time, people tend to anchor their identity to a small number of things. None of these are inherently wrong. Many of them are necessary. The question isn’t whether they matter — it’s whether they can hold.

Some people anchor identity to desire — feelings, impulses, authenticity, comfort.
Some anchor to tribe — belonging, ideology, group loyalty.
Some anchor to achievement — success, productivity, recognition.
Some anchor to virtue — discipline, self-control, moral integrity.
Some anchor to covenant — responsibility, love, roles freely taken on.
Some anchor to God — a transcendent source that defines worth beyond circumstance.

Each anchor produces a different kind of life under pressure.

And pressure is the key.

Loss Is the Test We All Fail Eventually

Loss doesn’t destroy us.

Loss reveals what was holding us all along.

Take away comfort from someone whose identity is anchored in desire, and chaos often follows.
Take away belonging from someone anchored in tribe, and anger often follows.
Take away success from someone anchored in achievement, and collapse often follows.

Even virtue — discipline, resilience, self-mastery — has limits. It can stabilize a person, but it can’t always restore meaning.

And even the best identities can be taken.

Loving roles — spouse, parent, caregiver, leader — give life deep purpose. But death, illness, betrayal, or time itself can remove them. That’s why good people still break under loss. Not because they are weak, but because what they were anchored to was loving but losable.

This is where most modern frameworks stop.

What Remains When Everything Else Is Taken

The question isn’t whether loss will come.
It always does.

The question is whether your identity is anchored to something that survives it.

A God-anchored identity doesn’t remove grief. It doesn’t bypass pain. It doesn’t make life easy or predictable. But it does something quietly radical: it grounds worth, meaning, and direction in something that cannot be taken — only lived into.

This isn’t about religion as a badge or belief as a weapon. It’s about orientation. About where identity ultimately rests when everything else is stripped away.

Why Keel Stone Exists

Keel Stone exists because modern life strips away identities faster than we’re taught to rebuild them.

We teach people how to succeed.
We teach them how to cope.
We teach them how to optimize.

But we rarely teach them how to re-anchor when what defined them disappears.

Keel Stone is not about shaming where you are or arguing what you believe. It’s about helping people understand what they’re anchored to — and guiding them, step by step, toward anchors that hold under pressure.

Not overnight.
Not perfectly.
But deliberately.

A Simple Question to Sit With

If everything you built your life on disappeared tomorrow —
what would still be true about you?

That question isn’t meant to accuse.
It’s meant to clarify.

And clarity is where rebuilding begins.