Ian Robertson: how to cope when the world is in turmoil
Posted on: 12 November 2024
Before the 2008 crash, Bertie Ahern famously quipped that “the boom times are getting even more boomer”. In the last two years we have seen evidence for massive change, not only in the climate, but in almost everything, from ChatGPT and AI to Donald Trump’s re-election. As the former taoiseach might have said: the change is getting changier.
If you have ever stepped on to a moving walkway that was actually stationary, you will have felt a little lurch or stumble. This happens because our brains work by predicting the future – moving walkways will move – and acting according to what we think will happen. When the future we predict doesn’t happen, our brains give a lurch, too. We snap out of the automatic pilot that dominates most of our waking life, and bring all our attention to figuring what has happened and – most importantly – what is going to happen.
If you have ever witnessed or been in an accident, your memory of the event may be very vivid and slowed down in a strangely cinematic, unreal way. This is your brain’s reaction to its forecasts being very wrong and it has ceased routine prediction mode and called in senior management – the brain’s prefrontal cortex – to focus on what is happening, paying such close attention that time slows down. There is also an emergency response – a spray of the chemical messenger noradrenaline to your brain – that makes you super-alert and a little breathless as your heart pumps faster.
Here is the problem. It’s becoming harder and harder for our brains to predict because of accelerating change. Who could have foreseen the devastating floods in Valencia, for example? Or the replacement of many white-collar jobs by artificial intelligence? Or an immigration crisis in Europe? Or war in Ukraine? Or a second term for Trump?
Our brain’s senior management and emergency services are being kept extremely busy, which, if prolonged, can cause a number of problems. One is that if we are using up our attention like this, it means that it is harder to focus on other things such as our families, reading, music, hobbies and sports. Instead of relaxing into these benign absorbers of our focus, we ruminate about all these unpredicted events and what possibly else could happen. Roll on the doom-scrolling.
Our bodies’ fight-or-flight systems were meant for just that – fighting off an assailant or running away from him. Then we were supposed to go to sleep and forget about it. But falling asleep requires you to switch off the brain’s noradrenaline system temporarily, which isn’t that easy if you have spent the evening worrying about the future of your job or war in Europe. The more you have been tensely ruminating during the day, the more likely that in your dreamy half-consciousness, a frightening image will switch on the noradrenaline and that will jar you awake with racing pulse.
So, we, our children and our grandchildren are going to have to become masters of our minds and emotions if we are to survive emotionally this accelerating change. How should we do this?
Winston Churchill said that “the empires of the future are the empires of the mind” – the future does not exist, except in our minds. And Epicurus mused that “the man least dependent upon the morrow goes to meet the morrow most cheerfully”. If the future is only in our minds then we can shape that future and not be dependent on fears about it.
That demands a stance towards the future that is courageous, and the best way we know to be brave is to learn to be confident, both individually and collectively. Confidence is the substance that creates the future, with anxiety its greatest enemy.
So how do we build confidence when anxiety about the future is gnawing at it?
When St Brendan launched his curragh to discover America a thousand years before Columbus, nothing was predictable except that he might tip over the horizon into an abyss. So it is for all explorers – they face total uncertainty and know that the future doesn’t actually exist – until we create it in our minds. In many ways everyone is an explorer now, not anxiously stumbling into a grim future, but rather bravely and systematically building it as we go. Everyone is now like the 13th-century Persian-Afghan poet Rumi, who wrote “as you start to walk on the way, the way appears”. In other words, you create the path to the future by your actions now, and doing stuff now means abandoning doom-scrolling and fretting about a future that is actually up for grabs.
Confidence consists of beliefs that I, and we, can take action that will create some future change. It isn’t optimism or self-esteem, it’s the brain’s future-creator and its secret sauce is its link to our brain’s action systems. In short, it makes us do stuff, it helps us price in uncertainty and take action in spite of anxiety. It has other effects too, which explain why confidence is a self-fulfilling prophecy: it lifts our mood, lowers anxiety, boosts our motivation and initiative and makes us more persuasive and influential with other people.
Taking action in spite of adversity or anxiety is one of the most powerful ways of building durable confidence. Ireland, I believe, has developed a collective confidence by its brave, gritty response to the hardships of the 2008-12 recession and we will be even stronger and more resilient in the face of future challenges because of that. But our children and teenagers must also learn that they can learn to be brave and confident, and that anxiety about the future can be turned into a healthy, if nervy excitement at the challenges ahead.
This article was first published in The Irish Times on Monday, 11 November, 2024. Read the original article on the Irish Times website here.