A lot is happening right now. The world is reorganising itself. The war with Iran is changing energy markets, supply chains, and political alliances. AI is wiping out entire job categories while simultaneously promising to make everyone more productive. Inflation pressures are not getting any better. Systems and institutions are under stress everywhere you look.

Most people are responding to this by refreshing the news and feeling sick about it. That’s not a plan for your life. You must have one because the ripple effects are everywhere. You need to take back control of your sanity. And your life. This is a guide to becoming the kind of person who doesn’t break when things fall apart.

This year is going to test people in ways they never thought possible. The Iran threat is external and visible. AI anxiety lives inside your head. It’s the fear that the career you spent a decade building might be automated in the next year or two. And the sense that you’re already falling behind. That your skills are depreciating faster than you can update them.

Both forces are not going away.

What then do you do with them?

Most people will break. Or they’ve already decided there’s nothing useful they can do. But they live in fear, catastrophising the worst-case scenarios until anxiety becomes the default state. The stoics had a term for the mental state that breaks people: indifferentia. The failure to distinguish between what is and isn’t in your control.

Marcus Aurelius spent years as a Roman emperor. Managing wars, plagues, economic collapse, political betrayal and returning to one discipline compulsively: the separation of what is up to me from what is not.

That was his coping mindset.

The people who stop expecting stability as a prerequisite for moving forward are a step ahead of everyone else who is losing their sanity.

Resilience in tough times is the ability to stay functional, curious, effective, and connected to your values inside genuine uncertainty.

A better move right now as the world reorganises for instability is to build a better relationship with volatility. The instinct is to protect yourself from it. To hedge every decision, wait for clarity and reduce exposure. Nassim Taleb’s concept of antifragility applies here directly. “The wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them,” he Said. Some systems don’t just survive stress. They get stronger from it. Muscles. Immune systems. Certain businesses. And minds. What kind of person can you become through systemic collapse?You can try a few things.

Take on one challenge right now that has genuine uncertainty built in. A new skill with no guaranteed payoff. A creative project without a clear audience. A professional risk that requires you to tolerate not knowing the outcome. Do any of these to train your nervous system to function under conditions it can’t avoid. Rethink AI threat as an intelligence partnership. A lot of the tech anxiety right now comes, in part, from treating the technology as a competitor. That framing is understandable.

But I didn’t practically prepare you for life. The way around it is to build a working relationship with it. Understand what it does well, what it does poorly, and where valuable human judgement still matters. Your knowledge of context, relationships, ethics, ambiguity, and work experience. The things intelligent tech cannot replicate at scale. Anxiety disappears fastest when replaced by active engagement. Learn the things you are afraid of. Lean into the tech. Re-skill in your spare time. Find out how you can integrate it.

Denial doesn’t work.

I recently came across what psychologists call “stress inoculation.”People who are exposed to moderate stressors. And who successfully overcome them, develop greater tolerance for larger stressors later. Post-stress resilience is a thing. Viktor Frankl called it finding meaning inside suffering. The experience of managing difficulty builds a kind of internal evidence base. I’ve been uncertain before. I’ve been scared before. I figured it out. That evidence accumulates into genuine psychological stability. The confidence that fear isn’t the end changes you.

Your past crises, the job loss, the health scare, the relationship that fell apart are not just painful memories. They’re practical evidence that prove your capacity to survive disruption. Use that data. Consciously. For everything else that stresses you out. In times of instability, protect your attention like an asset. Wars generate media cycles. AI generates conversations that may not be necessarily true. But your capacity for long, focused, independent thought is uniquely yours. You can do more to protect those capacities. Spend time with ideas longer than four minutes. Build a small media diet that includes at least one serious book per month and at least one thinker you disagree with.

Attention is how you improve good judgement. Guard it like the rest of your life depends on it.

The people who break hardest when economies change are the ones whose identities are attached to a job title, an industry, a status marker. To change that, anchor yourself to process. There’s a term for it. Process identity. It means detach your sense of self from what you have. And hone in on how you work. If you are a rigorous thinker, that quality transfers wherever you go. They survive disruption. A job title can be eliminated.

A way of being cannot.

This is what Marcus Aurelius was pointing at in Book IV of the Meditations: the inner citadel. The part of you that remains functional regardless of what the empire is doing around it. Build that.

Deliberately. Now.

One last tool.

Stop trying to predict how all the instability around us ends. You can never predict what Trump will do next. Or how AI changes the world of work. Nobody knows, and the cognitive energy spent predicting is better spent preparing. Think in scenarios and prepare accordingly. What are two or three plausible futures, and what would I do in each? If energy prices spike significantly, what’s your plan? If your current role is substantially taken over by tech intelligence in in a year or two, what adjacent skill can you leverage? Scenarios don’t require certainty. They require engagement. And engagement, more than any single skill or strategy, is what separates the people who are resilient from the ones who freeze.

This year is going to be hard for a lot of people. The instability is everywhere, the stakes are high, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you. But difficulty is not the same as defeat. The philosopher Epictetus was born a slave. He became one of the most influential thinkers in western history. He built, inside impossible circumstances, a philosophy of inner freedom that outlasted every empire he lived under. “No man is free who is not master of himself” he once said. The external world will do what it does. Markets will swing. Politicians will start wars. Conflicts will escalate or resolve. Technologies will replace and create. None of that is fully in your hands. What’s yours to influence is your attention, habits, response to difficulty, and willingness to keep growing inside uncertainty. That’s not a small thing.

It makes you unstoppably resilient.

Now and in the future.

Nobody is coming to stabilise the world for you. Not your government. Or the institutions we trust. Waiting for external stability before you build internal stability is the oldest trap in human history. The Stoics knew this. So did Frankl. And Epictetus. The specific crisis changes. The human challenge does not. What’s going on right now is scary. Minimising it doesn’t help you.

But neither does drowning in it.

Resilience is a decision you make before the difficulty takes over your life. You already know what’s coming. Who are you going to be inside it?

Start there.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

“The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.” – Seneca