How to Actually Survive When Everything Feels Like It's On Fire

The world won't stop screaming. Every ping on the phone delivers fresh disaster. Every headline promises the end of something. Doomscrolling has become a reflex, and the brain can't process one crisis before three more arrive. The desperate need to fix something, control anything, takes over when the entire system seems built to self-destruct.

Start here: figure out what's actually yours to manage. Most of what floods the news feed lives completely outside anyone's individual power. Getting angry about decisions made in boardrooms and back rooms changes nothing. A century ago, people lived entire lives without knowing most of what's happening now. Geography created natural filters. Today, information arrives nonstop, tricking people into thinking that knowing about something means being responsible for fixing it.

Cut through that. Personal control extends to exactly four things: what gets said, what gets done, what gets thought, and who gets helped. That's the list. Everything beyond that boundary is wasted effort on systems that operate regardless of individual panic. Recognizing that line separates actual engagement from theatre.

Social media perfected the theatre. Awareness became performance. Posting became activism. The algorithm rewards outrage and punishes nuance, turning genuine concern into content creation. Sharing articles feels productive. Writing threads feels important. None of it changes material conditions for anyone. The performance exhausts people while accomplishing nothing, creating the illusion of engagement while draining energy required for actual work.

History kills the fantasy of living through something unprecedented. Harry Truman pointed out that the only genuinely new thing in the world is history nobody bothered learning. Current events feel unique and terrifying. They aren't. Chaos runs on ancient scripts, swapping actors and locations while keeping the same plot.

The objection arrives immediately: but this time really is different. Nuclear weapons exist. Climate change threatens extinction. Technology amplifies everything. These concerns aren't invalid, but they're not unprecedented either. The atomic bomb dropped in 1945, and people lived through decades of genuine nuclear threat. Environmental collapse has been documented and ignored for fifty years. Technology has always amplified human capacity for destruction. The printing press destabilized empires. The telegraph changed warfare. Every generation believes its tools make catastrophe uniquely possible.

Learning history means recognizing patterns. Political instability follows economic anxiety. Scapegoating increases during resource scarcity. Authoritarianism rises when democratic institutions fail to deliver material improvements. These aren't abstract theories. They're observable cycles that repeat with predictable regularity. Studying history means asking how previous generations responded to comparable crises, what worked, what failed, and why.

Other people have survived worse with less. Socrates developed philosophy while watching Athens and Sparta destroy each other. The Antonine Plague wiped out millions when medicine barely existed. The Roman Republic disintegrated into civil war. The Great Depression demolished global markets. World War II killed tens of millions.

Marcus Aurelius ran an empire during plague and invasion. His advice? Step back. Look at patterns instead of drowning in the immediate nightmare. That perspective doesn't make suffering disappear, but it stops people from believing their particular hell is uniquely awful.

Previous generations survived without modern medicine, instant communication, functioning governments, or widespread education. They made it through conditions that would destroy most people today. Present chaos operates with more resources and better tools than almost any previous disaster.

Getting through this means three things: stop fixating on what can't be controlled, learn enough history to spot the patterns, and remember that humanity has a long resume of surviving absolute horror. Everything feels new until history says otherwise.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

Copyright © 2026 Maria Santos Salinas for FRONTeras.