It’s been a violent week here in the United States.
As you’ve almost certainly heard, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at a university event in Utah.
As you may or may not have heard, that same day, a 16-year-old student opened fire at Evergreen High School here in Colorado, less than 30 minutes from where I live. According to Everytown, this was at least the 100th incident of gunfire on school grounds in the U.S. this year.
Headlines like these pierce through the fog of everyday-ness and cause us to feel like we’re experiencing a sudden spike in violence.
But the truth is, statistically, last week likely wasn’t any more violent than usual — I’ll share some more information on that data in a moment — and sadly, that is what should really scare us.
Because the violence we’re swimming in? It’s constant.
We are drowning in violence — the kind we can see and the kind we don’t.
It’s the second kind I want to talk about first.
The Violence We Don’t See
There’s a kind of violence that doesn’t show up in breaking news alerts.
It doesn’t make your phone buzz.
It’s even hard to name, because it’s so… normal.
I call these things invisibly violent.
We don’t notice these things, and we might not even think about them as “violent,” at first. They are kinds of violence that are so embedded into our systems — into our workplaces, our economies, our governments — that we barely notice them.
But as I will show you, to be human is to be born into nonstop exposure to violence. Violence is everywhere in the water we swim in, and it impacts everything.
Examples? There Are Too Many
Let’s talk about a few examples of invisible violence embedded in our systems… we’ll start with one that’s been getting more visible in recent decades.
The patriarchy is invisibly violent.
If you identify as a woman, you likely don’t need me to explain this at all.
If you identify as a man, you may or may not have any clue what this really, truly, deeply means.
The patriarchy is violent not because every man is violent, but because the patriarchal structure itself is built on domination, subjugation, and control.
Here’s one I talk about a lot…
Hierarchy at work is invisibly violent.
Not because every manager is violent, but because the system itself is constructed around a belief that you are stupid, lazy, and not to be trusted with decision making.
Too intense? Think I’m wrong? Ponder everything your employer can take from you, especially if you live here in the United States. Lose your job here and you don’t just lose your income — you lose your healthcare, your housing stability, your identity, your access to medication, your ability to take care of your kids… it’s no surprise one of our primary American cultural exports is “workaholism.”
Let’s talk about another…
Poverty is invisibly violent.
Not because the poor are violent, but because the structures that cause and perpetuate poverty are.
If you’ve never been poor, let me tell you — everything becomes harder.
I haven’t really talked about this publicly yet, but when I lost my last company, I nearly lost everything.
I got seriously lucky because there were still a few pandemic-era relief programs floating around. One let me defer my mortgage. Without that, I would’ve lost my house. I got lucky too because I had paid into unemployment for a couple years prior, and I live in Colorado, a state with a halfway-decent social safety net. I also qualified for Medicaid for a while, which was, in a word, amazing, and I miss it terribly.
I wasn’t “prepared” for what happened to me; I am privileged and I am lucky.
But many entrepreneurs don’t get lucky.
And many workers aren’t privileged.
Our systems don’t support the poor — they punish them.
This is NOT because the people working inside the systems serving the poor are bad. Far from it, actually. The people serving the poor are usually battle-hardened, burned-out, gritty-as-hell g*ddamn warriors who put up with unbearable bureaucracy and completely untenable pay to help others survive.
So let’s be clear about that, too: serving the poor also makes you poor.
The violence of poverty is perpetuated all the way down.
None of these things are “bugs” by the way — this is the way the system is designed.
Our systems, more often than not at this point in history, are invisibly violent.
More Violence in Disguise
Let me give you a few more examples that we’ll explore in more detail down the road…
- “Human capital” is a deeply violent phrase. It’s one of the most grotesque ideas we’ve ever normalized, turning beautiful, vibrant human beings into a financial token, something to be bought and sold.
- Short-termism is a violent strategy. It prioritizes the now, usually at the direct expense of the future. It’s the root cause of environmental collapse, burnout, and business decisions that kill long-term trust.
- Billionaire-itis — my word for the mental illness of hoarding billions of dollars — is a violent lifestyle. It is impossible to make a billion dollars without exploitation.
Want to Know How Violent It Really Is?
I mentioned earlier that I wanted to get a sense of just how visibly violent things are in America, week to week, in general. I didn’t expect this research to be uplifting, but it literally made me feel sick to my stomach. And it was also surprisingly hard, even with A.I. tools.
The best source I found — gunviolencearchive.org — is a publicly accessible, crowdsourced database of every known incident of gun-related violence in the U.S., but here’s the thing: it’s too big to search.
Really.
I asked it for just 2025 stats — and it couldn’t give them to me. Not because the site’s broken, but because the database is so massive, it caps your results. You get 25 incidents per page. Each maximum search return is 80 pages. That’s 2,000 entries. And still… that search didn’t get me back to the start of 2025.
It actually didn’t even get me close.
2,000 entries only got me as far back as mid-August. That’s barely a month.
One month. Two thousand recorded incidents of gun violence.
Try to wrap your head around that.
This is what I mean when I say it’s the water we swim in… even the visible violence is constant to the point where we don’t notice it at all, unless we get a week like the last one and someone is killed who breaks through the media barrier.
Using Everytown data, I can tell you that last week was NOT more violent, at least inside our schools. It definitely didn’t make the Top 10, and based on my analysis, probably wouldn’t even be in the Top 100 worst weeks.
That’s some depressing sh*t my friends, but it also validates just how important it is that we start recognizing invisible violence.
Because if the visible violence is this omnipresent, how much worse is all the violence we don’t see?!
So What Do We Do?
Last week, I promised you an optimistic lens on what’s broken. This week, that feels pretty hard.
But I want to remind you that optimism isn’t blind hope. It’s a rebellion strategy.
The only way we can make something better is by seeing it for what it is now.
So, what do we do?
We start by seeing it.
By naming it. We stop pretending that violence only comes in the form of bullets, fists, or breaking news banners. We stop waiting for tragedy before we recognize the daily brutality embedded into the systems we passively live in.
And we start building something else.
Something more regenerative.
Something more just.
Something more human.
Because if we’re going to survive, let alone thrive, we have to stop swimming in poisoned water and pretending it’s fine.
Today, the optimistic choice IS to stop ignoring the invisible violence all around us.
One More Thing
If you’ve been on the receiving end of visible or invisible violence lately — in your community, at work, in the healthcare system, in any system that made you feel small, powerless, or unsafe — I just want to say:
You’re not imagining it.
It is real.
And you’re not alone.
Let’s see it. Let’s name it. Let’s realize that it’s NOT normal, and it’s NOT something we need to put up with.
And then let’s build what comes next.
