It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these. Partly because I haven’t really had much I felt compelled to write about.

But lately I’ve noticed something sitting underneath an enormous amount of modern anxiety: the feeling that something enormous is about to go wrong.

AI is going to take over. World War III is coming. Climate systems are going to collapse. An asteroid is going to hit us. Technology is moving too quickly. Governments are losing control. Civilization is coming apart.

It is a kind of eschatological anxiety — anxiety about the end of things.

And unlike ordinary anxiety about paying the mortgage, keeping your job, looking after your family, getting sick or being hit by a car, this anxiety operates at a scale where the individual has virtually no control.

Strangely, I think that realization contains the solution.

The Fork

Imagine the future as a fork in the road.

On one side, the pessimists are right.

Something catastrophic happens. Civilization collapses. AI destroys us. Nuclear war happens. The asteroid arrives.

Pick your apocalypse.

If that genuinely happens, there is remarkably little you can do about it while sitting in your backyard today.

You were always going to die eventually. The frightening difference in an end-of-the-world scenario is simply that suddenly everybody has been given roughly the same appointment.

That sounds horrifying.

But there is also something strangely liberating about it.

If something completely beyond your control eventually ends everything, then spending today terrified of it achieves absolutely nothing.

You might as well sit with your dog.

• Talk to your children.
• Have dinner with someone you love.
• Listen to the creek.
• Make something.
• Plant something.
• Help somebody.
• Enjoy the afternoon.

You don’t need to solve the end of civilization before you’re allowed to enjoy Tuesday.

There are legitimate dangers in all of those technologies. Human beings can use almost anything to hurt one another.

But if civilization keeps going, there is also an extraordinary future available to us.

And here’s the important part.

Your behavior today should be almost identical whichever future you believe is coming.

That is the entire idea.

The Superposition of Mindsets

You don’t actually have to decide which future is true.

Hold both possibilities in your head.

Maybe everything goes terribly wrong.

Maybe everything becomes astonishingly good.

You don’t know.

Neither do I.

And neither does the person screaming certainty at you on TikTok.

Not recklessly.

Not fatalistically.

Not, “YOLO, the world’s ending, so I’ll empty my bank account and set fire to my responsibilities.”

Because if the world doesn’t end, Future You is going to be extremely annoyed with Present You.

You still save money. You still look after your health. You still educate your children. You still build things. You still contribute. You still plan.

But you stop behaving as though you have to emotionally experience every possible future catastrophe today.

There is a difference between preparing for the future and living inside an imagined future.

This Doesn’t Cure Ordinary Anxiety

There is an important distinction here.

You can still worry about the electricity bill.

You can still worry about your children.

You can still worry about your health, your career, your relationships and whether the strange noise coming from your car is about to become a very expensive strange noise.

Those are problems occurring at the scale of your actual life.

Some can be acted upon.

Some can be planned for.

Some can be solved.

And some simply have to be endured.

I’m not pretending that mindfulness magically eliminates those things. I suffer from anxiety myself. I know perfectly well that telling an anxious brain to “just stop worrying” is about as useful as telling someone with hiccups to simply stop hiccupping.

But the enormous background layer of existential dread is different.

Once something becomes sufficiently large and sufficiently outside your control, worrying about it stops being preparation.

It becomes suffering in advance.

The Logical Response Is the Same

That’s what I find comforting about the fork.

If civilization ends, spending the preceding years terrified didn’t save it.

If civilization survives and the future becomes extraordinary, spending those same years terrified meant missing part of the extraordinary life you already had.

So whichever branch reality eventually takes, the rational response today remains remarkably stable.

• Be present.
• Love people.
• Build things.
• Help where you can.
• Prepare sensibly.

Don’t destroy tomorrow because you’re frightened tomorrow might not exist.

And don’t sacrifice today because you’re obsessing about what tomorrow might become.