The World Is on Fire. Now What? |
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The Greek god Pan was a wild deity – half goat, half man, a creature of the wilderness who played pipes and chased nymphs. He is the god of nature, of groves and glens, of cherries bursting crimson and branches heavy with flowers. He is the god of spring and fertility, of the world bursting into splendor.
But like all gods, he also has a darker side.
When Pan appeared to travelers crossing remote places, or to soldiers in battle, his presence could trigger an overwhelming, irrational terror. People would lose all sense of direction and scatter headlessly. The Greeks called this divinely generated madness panikon — literally, “pertaining to Pan”. And that’s where our word panic comes from.
It’s a useful origin story, because it captures something psychology also suggests: panic is more than ordinary fear. It’s a sudden state of alarm that can flood the body and make clear thinking much harder. And if that state sounds familiar right now, well, join the club.
Why Panic Doesn’t Serve You
The triggers are everywhere today. Wars are destroying communities and destabilizing economies. Artificial intelligence is advancing fast enough to make entire professions feel precarious. And the leadership that’s supposed to provide a steady hand often feels like the opposite.
When we are under acute stress, or suffering from high anxiety, thinking tends to narrow; flexible problem-solving becomes harder, and people are more likely to fall back on fast, habitual, threat-driven responses (the psychological logic behind what we loosely call “fight or flight”). The irony is that this is precisely the opposite of what we actually need in stressful situations. When the economy is uncertain, that’s when you need to think strategically about your career; when the political landscape is volatile, that’s when you need discernment about what to pay attention to and what to ignore. Panic makes doing this harder – and furthermore, it’s contagious. A landmark study by Kramer, Guillory, and Hancock showed that emotional states spread through social networks even without direct interaction. When Facebook algorithmically reduced positive or negative posts in users’ feeds, those users’ own posts shifted in the same emotional direction.
Moreover, panic can feel like productivity. For example, when we doom-scroll, it can feel like staying informed, or when we catastrophize about what AI will do to our job, we may think we’re doing strategic planning. So, the problem isn’t just that panic shuts down clear thought and wise action. It’s also that panic can fool us into thinking that we are thinking clearly and acting wisely, when actually we’re doing the opposite.
The Recovery of Judgment
The antidote to panic is the recovery of judgment – the ability to put things in perspective and to tell the difference between what actually matters and what’s a passing storm.
Almost everyone knows what this recovery feels like, because almost everyone has experienced its simplest version. You’re lying awake at 2 a.m., convinced that something – your job, your finances, a decision you made – is catastrophically wrong. Everything feels urgent and terrible. Then morning comes. The facts haven’t changed. But somehow you can see them differently. The thing that felt like a crisis at 2 a.m. looks like a problem at 8 a.m. – still real, but manageable. You can distinguish between what needs action and what your exhausted brain was inflating.
The challenge, in a world where Pan’s voice is loud and constant, is learning to access the 8 a.m. mind while the world feels like it is eternally in the midst of its darkest night. Here are three practices that help us meet that challenge.
Cultivate a Mindfulness Practice. Panic often creates urgency – the feeling that you must act now, that slowing down is irresponsible. Mindfulness helps you to recognize that feeling for what it is: a physiological alarm, not a reliable guide to action. When you feel the panic rising – the urge to doom-scroll, to fire off a reactive email, to catastrophize at 2 a.m. – the goal isn’t to suppress it. It’s to see it. Ask yourself: Is this response moving me forward, or just making me feel like I’m moving? That gap between stimulus and response is where judgment lives.
Curate Your Information Diet. The 24-hour news cycle and social media are engineered to make everything feel like a crisis – because crisis drives clicks. Panic is contagious, so set deliberate windows for news consumption rather than grazing all day. Unfollow sources that thrive on outrage. The goal isn’t ignorance – it’s recognizing the human vulnerability to panic, and protecting ourselves from it.
Talk to People You Trust. When we’re panicking, we can suffer under the illusion that we’re thinking clearly when we’re actually spiraling. In isolation – or in algorithmically curated echo chambers – there’s no external check on whether our “strategic planning” is real or just panic-driven catastrophizing. Actual conversation with trusted people is the antidote: people who will say “I think you’re overreacting” or “No, that’s real, and here’s what I’d consider.” And the time to build those relationships is before you need them – not in the middle of the crisis. When Pan shows up, you want to already know who to call.
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Pan Doesn’t Have to Win
The Greeks understood something important about panic: It was a force that came from outside you. Pan appeared, and you lost your mind. But the story also implies something hopeful – the madness was situational, not permanent. Once Pan left, people came back to themselves.
The current moment is a Pan moment. The god has shown up in the wilderness, and the noise is deafening. But you don’t have to scatter. You can stand still long enough to find your bearings, and then move – not in terror, but with intention.
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