Open your phone. Scroll for thirty seconds. It's enough to feel a familiar, cold clutch in your stomach.
The feed delivers a relentless barrage of curated catastrophe: intractable political polarization, looming environmental deadlines, bewildering leaps in artificial intelligence, and a global sense of instability that feels both unprecedented and unbearable. We are overwhelmed, exhausted, and convinced that our moment in time—our specific collection of crises—is uniquely poised on the brink of collapse. We are, in a word, terminally online, and the consensus of the algorithm is that the end is nigh.
We feel it in our bones: This time, it's different.
But what if it's not? What if this acute, paralyzing anxiety is not a new symptom of our modern age, but one of the oldest, most recurring, and most predictable patterns in human history?
In my upcoming book, The World is Always Never Ending, I explore this very idea. The book offers not a solution to our problems, but a perspective on them—a radical antidote to our modern despair. It argues that this feeling of "end times" is a cyclical feature of the human experience. And by understanding that, we can find something profound: not naive optimism, but a grounded, resilient hope.
This isn't to dismiss the very real challenges we face. It is, instead, to give us "permission to exhale"—to stop reacting with panicked, short-term alarm and start engaging with the long-term endurance that history proves we are capable of.
How? By recognizing the patterns.
The Existential Dread of Mutually Assured Destruction
Many of us today fear a slow-motion collapse. But for an entire generation, the end was expected to be instantaneous, announced by a blinding flash.
The book reminds us of the profound existential dread of the Cold War. This wasn't a vague anxiety about societal norms changing; it was the daily, normalized possibility of total nuclear annihilation. Children practiced "duck and cover" drills, hiding under wooden desks as if that could save them from an atomic blast. Families built fallout shelters. The Cuban Missile Crisis wasn't a cable news segment; it was a terrifying, 13-day period where the world genuinely held its breath, awaiting a civilization-ending war.
To the people living in 1962 or 1983, that was the end of the world. It was a binary, a switch that could be flipped at any moment by a mistake or a miscalculation. Our dread, spread thin over climate models and AI timelines, is real. Theirs was concentrated, immediate, and absolute. And yet, the world did not end. We adapted, we negotiated, we built off-ramps, and we slowly, painstakingly, pulled back from the brink.
Historical Context Matters: Understanding that previous generations faced their own "end of the world" scenarios—and survived—doesn't diminish our current challenges. It equips us to face them with resilience rather than paralysis.
When Society Eats Itself: From Salem to Social Media
"But our society is collapsing," we argue. "The information is tearing us apart. We are turning on each other."
The World is Always Never Ending asks us to look at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. We remember it as a bizarre, isolated incident of hysteria. The book reframes it as a perfect storm of social instability, political anxiety (loss of their charter), and a new, destabilizing "information technology": the pamphlet.
The panic in Salem was a media-fueled crisis. Rumors of spectral evidence—"proof" unseen by anyone but the accuser—were legitimized by "experts" (like Cotton Mather) and spread rapidly through print. The social fabric didn't just fray; it was ripped apart. Neighbors accused neighbors. The courts, the highest authority in the land, failed. Over 200 people were accused, and 20 were executed.
To the people of Salem, it was literally the end of their world. They believed Satan was actively walking among them, that their community had failed, and that the foundations of their society were crumbling. The parallels to our own time are impossible to miss. We, too, are grappling with a new information ecosystem (social media) that amplifies our worst fears, gives voice to "spectral evidence," and turns neighbor against neighbor. The technology has changed, but the human-driven panic is identical.
The Terror of Absolute Political Polarization
"But our politics have never been this bad," we insist. "The divide is unbridgeable."
History, again, offers a chilling perspective. The book gestures to the French Revolution, an event that began with the highest ideals of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" and rapidly degenerated into the Reign of Terror.
This was not just political disagreement. This was the systematic, state-sanctioned execution of political opponents. The "other side" wasn't just wrong; they were traitors, "enemies of the people," whose very existence threatened the new republic. The guillotine became the symbol of a society so polarized it began to auto-cannibalize. Tens of thousands were executed in a paranoid frenzy to root out ideological impurity.
To the moderate in Paris in 1793, it was clear that civilization itself was over. The great experiment in human liberty had failed, replaced by a blood-soaked nightmare. Our current political divisions are toxic and dangerous. But they are, for most of us, not yet the Terror.
Perspective Without Dismissal: Acknowledging that "things have been worse" is not about minimizing current problems—it's about preventing panic from paralyzing our ability to address them effectively.
The Good News: History as a Spiral, Not a Circle
So what's the point? That things have been bad before, so we should just "suck it up"?
No. That would be history as a flat circle—a depressing, fatalistic loop where we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes forever.
The World is Always Never Ending offers a far more powerful and hopeful metaphor: history as a spiral.
We do revisit the same human themes: existential fear, technological disruption, tribal panic, and political polarization. But we do not, the book argues, revisit them from the same place. Each time we swing around the cycle, we are at a slightly different elevation, armed—however imperfectly—with the lessons from the last time.
This is the "good news."
After Salem, we didn't just move on. We built. We created bedrock legal principles, like the presumption of innocence and the right to confront one's accuser, specifically to prevent that kind of panic from ever taking over our courts again. After the excesses of McCarthyism (a 20th-century echo of the same panic), the courts and the press eventually found their courage and re-asserted the values of civil liberties.
We learn. We build. We correct. Progress is not a clean, straight line. It is a messy, lurching, two-steps-forward-one-step-back spiral.
The Spiral of Progress: Each time we face a familiar challenge, we bring the lessons learned from previous encounters. We are not doomed to repeat history—we are learning from it, however imperfectly.
Permission to Exhale
This is the perspective our modern, panicked world desperately needs. Our problems—from climate change to political polarization—are real and demand our urgent attention. But when we view them as unique, terminal, and unprecedented, we react with the panicked, short-sighted desperation of those in Salem.
If we instead view them as the current turn of the spiral—another iteration of a profound human challenge—we can act differently. We can stop doomscrolling and start building. We can see that our true inheritance from history isn't the crises themselves, but the long, documented, and undeniable story of our resilience.
The world is always ending. And yet, it never does.
This exploration of our historical panics and the resilient 'spiral' of progress is the central theme of my upcoming book, The World is Always Never Ending: A Modern Antidote for the Worried Well-Informed and Terminally Online, available April 2nd, 2026.
The book takes a deeper dive into these cycles—from the witch hunts of Salem to the Cold War, from the Luddites to the Satanic Panic—not to dismiss our current fears, but to place them in the context of human adaptation and endurance. It is, ultimately, a toolkit for finding perspective and a grounded hope in an age of anxiety.