The Inner Monologue

Oh no! The stock market is crashing! A politician said something unhinged! A corporation did something evil! A new virus is spreading! A celebrity said something dumb! The world is definitely ending this time—just like it was definitely ending last time, and the time before that, and the time before that…

Here’s a fun fact: Reality has a remarkable tendency to self-correct. Not always, of course—sometimes things do go catastrophically wrong. But most of the time? The crisis du jour fizzles out, the outrage machine moves on, and the doomsayers quietly pretend they weren’t hyperventilating into a paper bag just a few months prior.

This isn’t just optimism—it’s regression to the mean, baby. Extremes (good or bad) rarely last because chaos tends to settle back toward the average. The louder the panic, the more likely we’re just witnessing a statistical blip, not the new normal.

The Crisis Cycle: A Brief History of Overreaction

Remember when [insert past panic here] was going to destroy civilization? Yeah, me neither. Because we’ve all collectively forgotten about it in favor of the new existential threat.

• Y2K? Mostly fine.
• 2012 Mayan Apocalypse? Shockingly, still here.
• Every single “market collapse predicts the Great Depression 2.0”? Markets recovered. Again. And again. And again.
• That one world leader who was absolutely going to start WWIII? Still tweeting. Still irrelevant.

This isn’t to say bad things don’t happen. They do. Wars, disasters, pandemics, financial meltdowns—they’re real, and they suck. But the perceived magnitude of a crisis in the moment is almost always inflated by the 24/7 panic-o-matic news cycle. And given enough time, things tend to regress toward sanity.

Why Do We Keep Falling For This?

Because fear sells. Outrage clicks. Doom-scrolling is addictive. And let’s be honest—there’s a weird thrill in believing that this time, things are really different. That this is the moment history pivots. That this scandal, this tweet, this market dip is the one that finally unravels society.

But here’s the statistical truth: Outliers fade. Extremes moderate. The pendulum swings back. The more hysterical the reaction, the more likely we’re just witnessing a temporary deviation—not a permanent collapse.

So What Should We Actually Do?

Stay informed, but don’t let the outrage machine dictate your life. If you made major decisions based on every “THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING” headline, you’d have:

• Sold all your possessions and moved to a bunker (at least three times).
• Converted your life savings into gold, then Bitcoin, then canned beans.
• Started learning Mandarin/Russian/[insert geopolitical boogeyman language] because obviously that’s the next world order.

Instead, maybe just… wait. Observe. See if the thing actually matters in a month. Most of the time, it won’t—because regression to the mean is the universe’s way of rolling its eyes at our drama.

The world isn’t ending today. Probably. And if it is? Well, at least you didn’t waste your last days hoarding cream corn.