# Staying Sane When Insanity Is a Click Away #Well-Being *Last Updated: February, 2026* Insanity is a click away. In the last week, my feeds delivered a sequence of stories that didn’t feel like “updates” as much as they felt like a direct hit to the nervous system: violence inside homes, injustice moving at institutional speed, and a fog of misinformation that makes even real suffering harder to hold with clarity. It’s a modern kind of exhaustion. Not because the world suddenly got messy. The world has always been messy. Because now the mess can live in your pocket. It can tap you on the shoulder all day. And it can do it with perfect personalisation. So you’re left with a quiet, unsettling question: > **If the world is falling apart the way it is, is it even worth focusing on what I’m creating?** I don’t have a universal answer. I only have a stance I return to, again and again. “Rationalise” is the right word here. Not because it’s cold. Because it’s deliberate. ## First, Choose Meaning Over Noise Information is infinite. Meaning isn’t. If you don’t decide what matters, your feed will decide for you. And your feed is optimised for attention, not for wholeness. So the first question is not “What’s happening out there?”. It is, > **What adds meaning to my life, even in a world like this?** - For most, meaning is intensely personal: craft, solitude, learning, building something beautiful - For some, it might be family: stability, care, reducing chaos for the people you love - For others, it could be community: service, repair, showing up where institutions don’t Most lives are a blend. The blend can change over time. But meaning has to be chosen. Otherwise, it gets outsourced. ## Draw Your Circle of Influence, Then Defend It Once you know what you’re trying to honour, you can draw a boundary around the part of reality where your actions actually compound. Your circle of influence includes: - the work you can do - the skills you can build - the people you can show up for - the local problems you can reduce - the institutions you can strengthen > **Most importantly, your circle of influence includes the conversations you can have that don’t degrade into performative outrage.** Inside this circle, you can secure agency. Outside this circle, you can still care. But you can’t live there. Not full-time. Not without slowly losing your capacity to do anything useful. ## Stop Confusing Awareness with Responsibility Feeling informed can impersonate feeling useful. You can consume despair for two hours and call it “being engaged.” > **But engagement without agency becomes self-harm with better branding.** So I try to make a simple trade with myself: If a piece of information does not change my actions, it does not deserve my attention. If it does change my actions, I let it in, convert it into a concrete move, and close the loop. Read. Decide. Act. Exit. Otherwise, the mind stays open in the worst way, like a dozen browser tabs of grief, all buffering, none resolving. ## The Last Move is to Cancel the Rest, Unapologetically This is where people get uncomfortable, because it looks like indifference. It isn’t. It’s prioritization. Distraction today isn’t just entertainment. It’s an industry. It’s engineered. It’s profitable. And if you don’t build boundaries, you become the product. Which brings me to the only analogy that feels accurate. ## We are Early Humans Holding Fire Information technology is like the discovery of fire. At first, it’s miraculous. You can see in the dark. You can cook. You can gather. You can protect. And then you burn down forests. Not because you’re evil. Because you’re early. Early humans had power before they had vocabulary, norms, and institutions for the most productive use of that power. That gap between capability and maturity caused damage. That’s us. We have amplification before discernment. Virality before verification. Outrage before governance. So yes, we will see misuse. We will see manipulation. We will see harm that scales. But we will also see the longer arc: better tools, better norms, better institutions, and hopefully, better self-control. Early humans couldn’t imagine flight. Fire was just fire. And yet here we are, crossing oceans in the sky. ## The Stance I Return to Your job is not to carry the whole world in your skull. Your job is to live a life of increasing alignment with your values, your craft, and your people. To secure agency where you can. To do real work in a real radius. And to pass the mantle forward a little cleaner than you received it. Not because the world is fine. Because your attention is your only non-renewable resource. And giving it away carelessly helps nobody.