The Most Important Thing You Can Do in 2023

How Do You Stay Sane and Strong in an Age Like…This?

Image Credit: Chagall

These are strange and troubled times. And in them, the question I get most often is simple, and heartrending. “What should I do?” It’s meant in many different ways. With my life, career, where should I go, what’s the point. But beneath all these is the true meaning of this question: how do I, this little, fragile thing, make it? Through times like these? And nurture, protect, shepherd my loves one, too? When I so often feel adrift, alone, powerless, scared?

Be brave with me, my friend. Nobody’s listening right now. It’s just you and me. And here, you can admit it. The fear. You don’t have to play the game of pretending not to feel it. Here, let me be honest with you, so you know that you can be honest, too. Me? Most days, recently, I’ve woken up in a panic. And I struggled, over months, to figure out just why. After all, my life is…OK. I’m not exactly Elon Musk or Andrew Tate, and I guess that’s a blessing, right? So…why?

I wracked my brain. And then I did something that made me feel a whole lot better. I asked around. It turned out that everyone’s feeling the same thing. Everyone I know, that is. This weird thing happens with me, when you know me. People are honest with me, because they know I’m not judging them. So when I asked my friends, I was shocked — if not surprised — that all of them, too, had this feeling. They were waking up in a panic, every day, too. And that’s if they could get to sleep to begin with.

Here, let me take you through a couple of examples. There’s my friend Miles — he’s a corporate bigwig and he has an incredibly cushy life. And yet…there he is…feeling just like I do. There’s my friend Laura, the successful artist. Every week, it’s a new city she jets off to, another gallery. She feels the same way too. My friends Jack and Audrey, gentle, successful, funny, charming people, with a little family. They should be enjoying their kids, their weekends, and yet…panic stations.

So. Be brave. You can be that guy who tells me, loudly, beating his chest — and it’s usually a guy, isn’t it? — “it’s not happening to me!! I’ve never felt better!!” OK, George Santos, you do you. The rest of us? We need to figure this out. This bad feeling. Because it’s becoming a problem.

Isn’t it? If you admit you’re feeling this way — regularly, chronically — then the first thing you might notice is that, well, it’s not very nice. Not healthy. Not normal. Nobody should feel like this regularly, and yet so many of us do. It’s a problem for many of us at this point. It debilitates us. It stops us from not just enjoying our lives — but from really being in them, contributing fully to them, making good decisions, taking responsibility, figuring it all out. Chronic stresss of this sort? Trauma, even? It’s a problem.

I’m not saying you are the problem. At all. Instead, let’s continue with another observation. At this juncture, another kind of guy will jump and sputter — “but that’s just anecdotal!!” Ah, my friend. If only it were. What happens when we look at this age, empirically? From the lens of how it feels? A shocking finding — and I mean that — emerges.

A pulse of dread is sweeping the globe. That’s not a joke. Perhaps the most authoritative research of its kind recently found that people are more pessimistic and afraid than at any point in the last century. Let me say that again. People feel worse right now than at any time in the last century. That’s…startling…to say the least. Worse than during…world wars, the Great Depression, the Recession, all of it. So a huge pulsation of dread is making the human heart skip beat after beat. Not my opinion. Empirical fact.