A Moment to Feel: When the Budget Bill Takes More Than Money
If you are feeling deep loss right now, you are not alone.
The new budget bill has real and painful consequences:
Millions will lose health insurance.
Millions of children will lose SNAP food benefits and school lunches.
Cuts to USAID effectively end a 70-year commitment that has saved 90 million lives globally.
ICE is now the largest law enforcement force in the United States, with a budget bigger than the Marine Corps, and larger than many national militaries worldwide.
These are not abstractions. These are gut punches to human dignity, human security, and human hope.
If you feel anger, frustration, sadness, or grief, allow it. Feelings do not require guilt, shame, or apology. This is a moment to pause. To feel. To breathe. To honor what was lost—because what was lost matters.
Why does it feel so crushing?
It comes down to the fundamentals of the human experience, as explained by the Transformational Human Experience (THX) frameworks:
Prospect Theory teaches us that losses feel far heavier than gains feel joyful. You are wired to hurt more from losing safety nets than to cheer for even twice as much in promised growth.
The 12 Utilities (How we measure usefulness) reveal what’s really being taken away:
Access to food, healthcare, and education
Security in knowing you can survive a bad break
Clarity about a hopeful future
Consistency of systems you relied on
Closure in knowing you were protected, not targeted
Value as a human being worthy of dignity, not just productivity
Because these utilities have collapsed, so has your sense of PERMAH (How we determine if something is life-changing)—the positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, achievement, and health that help us flourish. When these dimensions erode, you don’t just feel the loss in your bank account. You feel it in your heart.
What can you do now?
Pause. Grieve. Feel it without apology. This is your human right.
Then, when you are ready, use these transformational micro-moments to start reclaiming your sense of agency and hope:
Positive Emotion: Seek out moments of gratitude, even if they are tiny, to remind yourself that good still exists.
Engagement: Find a small act of service or advocacy to do. Action, even in the smallest measure, can transform helplessness into movement.
Relationships: Connect with others feeling this pain. Collective grief is easier to carry.
Meaning: Remember that being human is more than being “useful” in an economic system. Your inherent worth is not up for debate.
Achievement: Set one achievable, manageable task—just one—to move forward today.
Health & Wellbeing: Rest. Eat. Breathe. Tend to your body as an act of resistance and resilience.
We cannot flourish when our basic utilities are stripped away. But we can find seeds of flourishing by honoring our feelings and standing together for what must be rebuilt.
Engagement Challenge
I invite you to answer, right here, right now:
What is one thing you are feeling today?
What is one micro-moment of hope you can create, even in this loss?
Let’s hold space for each other. Let’s remember: even in a world that cuts away at our foundations, we still have the power to build again. Together.
