A new year is here. Traditionally, this is a time for looking ahead, imagining, and planning.
But I’ve noticed that most of my friends are struggling to think beyond the next few days or weeks. I’ve also found it hard to picture a better future, for myself or in general.
I shared this thought on social media near the end of 2025 and got many replies. A lot of people agreed—they felt like they were just existing, stuck in a bubble of the present, with the road ahead foggy and uncertain. Unlike the comforting Buddhist idea of living in the moment, this feeling of being trapped in the now was paralyzing.
I mentioned this to my therapist, Dr. Steve Himmelstein, a clinical psychologist in New York City with nearly 50 years of experience. He assured me I wasn’t alone. Most of his clients, he said, have “lost the future.”
People are feeling overwhelmed and overstimulated, bombarded daily with bad news—global economic and political instability, rising costs, job insecurity, extreme weather. This not only increases anxiety but also makes it harder to keep going.
I hadn’t fully realized how much the idea of a better future had sustained me—how it made life more livable, hardship more bearable, and creativity possible. When I could easily imagine a more just and healthy world, it was easier to commit to long-term projects and invest in the next generation. But in our current political and environmental climate, that vision has grown hazier, and I, like many others, find it much harder to be productive and plan ahead.
When I asked Himmelstein if our current inability to think about the future is unique, he said it seems worse now than right after 9/11. He spoke with other psychologists in his circle to get their impressions.
“Clients are less optimistic now, and they don’t talk about the future much,” Himmelstein reported. “The consensus is that people don’t seem to feel very good about their lives right now. There’s a lot of despair. I have a few clients who don’t really have plans anymore. And when I ask what they’re looking forward to, most have no answer. They’re not looking forward to things.”
Himmelstein was one of the last students of the renowned psychologist Viktor Frankl, a concentration camp survivor, professor, and author of Man’s Search for Meaning. From Frankl, Himmelstein learned that to survive and thrive, we need to believe in a stable, brighter tomorrow. During his darkest days, Frankl was able not only to accept the suffering around him but to refocus on the larger meaning of his life. It was this “tragic optimism” that protected him from losing all faith in the future.
When I asked Himmelstein what Frankl might think about current events, he paused. “I think it would scare him,” he said, “like it’s scaring all of us.”
How crisis affects our ideas of the future
Human brains weren’t originally built to think about the future—and we’re still bad at it. When clients struggle with this, Himmelstein asks them to daydream about their lives one or two years from now in a more perfect world. “The future is their homework,” he said.
But it’s not easy. In a sense, our biology works against us.
“From an evolutionary standpoint, we aren’t designed to think about the very distant future,” said Dr. Hal Hershfield, a psychologist and professor of marketing and behavioral decision-making at UCLA.
In fact, we don’t really think about our future—we remember it, said Hershfield, who studies how humans think about time and how that influences our emotions and behaviors. When we daydream or picture ourselves later in life, we eWe essentially create memories, which we then use to build our ideas about the future. This process, known as “episodic future thinking,” supports our decision-making, emotional regulation, and ability to plan.
During times of crisis, a type of radical uncertainty emerges where all the factors that could affect future events are unknowable in advance. This uncertainty interferes with our ability to imagine those futures, making it harder to predict what will happen and leaving us feeling that calculating accurate probabilities is nearly impossible.
As Hershfield noted, humans have faced this before. For example, people living through the Cuban missile crisis had no clear way of knowing if they—or the world itself—would survive.
“What feels very different now,” Hershfield said, “is that it feels like it’s coming from multiple fronts. It’s everything from political uncertainty in the US and elsewhere, health insecurity from the very fresh memory of a global pandemic, job insecurity from AI, geopolitical insecurity, to environmental insecurity.”
All these crises are happening at the same time, and because they interact, their effects pile up. Social scientists refer to these stacked crises as a polycrisis, during which radical uncertainty becomes widespread.
This lack of predictability creates more doubt about the future, blocking our ability to imagine ourselves in it. In a recent study, participants were asked to write down as many possible future events for themselves as they could. Those who were reminded that the future is uncertain produced 25% fewer possible events than the control subjects and took much longer on the task. They also rated their thoughts as less reliable. Simply thinking about uncertainty made it more difficult for them to recall all their hopes and plans.
Dr. Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychology professor who studies how humans navigate the concept of time, explained that the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for thinking about our future selves—is one of humankind’s last evolutionary additions. Simply put, our species hasn’t been able to conceptualize the future for very long.
Gilbert has spent decades studying and writing about how bad we are at predicting the future and how our future selves will react to it. “One problem is that we don’t imagine events correctly,” Gilbert said. “The larger problem is that we don’t know who we will be when we are experiencing that event.”
We rely on the idea of a stable, continuous future self to help us understand the present and achieve a sense of greater purpose, making it easier to plan and make decisions, said Hershfield. We lean on the idea that the future will resemble the present, at least to some degree. Then we use our predictions to shape the present—for example, brushing our teeth to avoid cavities or planning dinner while eating breakfast.
It may be harder to plan when we feel insecure about what’s coming. In a series of recent small studies, when people were reminded that the future is radically uncertain, it lowered their self-certainty as well as their feelings that life itself is meaningful.
How other cultures have dealt with uncertainty amid crisis
Dr. Daniel Knight, an anthropologist at the University of St Andrews, has been thinking about how humans understand the future for years. While doing fieldwork in Greece during the 2008-2010 debt crisis, he observed how people coped during an extended polycrisis.
“Greece had a migration crisis, an energy crisis, an economic crisis,” Knight said. “I was working with people born in the 1980s and 1990s, who were born into stories about modernity and progress and a very capitalist idea of accumulation. And almost…”Overnight, all of that was stripped from them.
Suddenly, the future Greek citizens had always believed was inevitable was no longer possible. Instead, they looked to history for familiar scenarios. “Almost overnight, conversations shifted from planning weddings and holidays or taking out loans to talk of returning to times of hardship—particularly the great famine of 1941,” said Knight.
In response to the debt crisis, the Greek government passed its first austerity bailout package in 2010, focused on drastic spending cuts and higher taxes. People began comparing their situation to life during the Axis occupation in World War II. These comparisons helped them see not only that the crisis could be overcome, but that a brighter future might emerge from it.
Another coping mechanism was to focus on much shorter timeframes. “Some of them hunkered down in the now,” Knight said. They refocused on themselves, immediate family, and friends, making only short-term plans. Knight noticed more people turning to their community for help in reimagining their lives, creating what he calls micro-utopias. Cycling clubs sprang up everywhere, and people made more effort to spend time together.
I recalled something similar beginning to happen in New York City as we emerged from pandemic lockdowns. Friends and colleagues joined community gardens or running clubs, organized community programs and meetups, and volunteered.
Knight is working on a book about Europe from 1644 to 1660, a time of great strife: the Great Plague, an economic crisis, the burning of Constantinople and London, fears of a new ice age, and a religious crisis in England. The end result of this turmoil, as Knight said, was “a more democratic form of governance and decentralized power, a spreading out of economic risk, and improved sanitation.” Importantly, Europeans learned to listen to their experts and funneled more resources into new universities to support science and the humanities. In sum, the polycrisis of the 1600s gave birth to the Enlightenment.
It’s another reminder that we’re not so special and our times are not so unprecedented. “Our problems may be different now,” Knight said, “but there is still hope. We have a chance to choose which future we want. And depending on which version we choose, that transforms our actions today. We can make choices and collectively work toward that future.”
How to Get the Future Back
It may be hard to envision distant, positive outcomes amid a crisis, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. “We’d be foolish to stop planning,” said Hershfield. “We can still think about the values that are important to us and plan around them.” So if you know you want to support your child’s college education, for instance, you can still try to build toward that—as much as is possible during tough economic times.
But it’s also important to be more flexible about those plans and have compassion for ourselves. Copious uncertainty from multiple directions can cause us to regret past choices, cautioned Hershfield. It’s not unusual for people to think about what they should have been doing 10, 20, or even 30 years ago to better prepare for this timeline. “That feeling can be paralyzing,” he said, “and it can make us just bury our heads in the sand.”
When something isn’t working or an unexpected event knocks plans off course, it’s okay to shift gears. And if you’re feeling overwhelmed and anxious about what might happen, Hershfield suggests refocusing on events that will most likely happen. This makes it easier to remember the future self we envisioned and plan accordingly.
As a new year begins, it’s good to remember that we are more resilient than we think.”We are not as fragile as a century of psychologists have led us to believe,” said Gilbert. “People who experience real tragedy and trauma usually recover more quickly than they anticipate, often returning to their original level of happiness, or near it. That’s the good news—we are a resilient species, even though we don’t realize it.”
Frequently Asked Questions
FAQs Coping with Overwhelm in an Age of Multiple Crises
BeginnerLevel Questions
1 What does it mean to live in an age of multiple overlapping crises
It means were constantly facing several major global problems at oncelike climate change political instability economic uncertainty and public health threatsthat all affect each other and feel like theyre happening simultaneously
2 Why do I feel so overwhelmed by news and global events even if they dont directly impact me daily
Our brains arent wired to process a constant stream of global bad news Thanks to technology were exposed to traumatic events worldwide 247 which can trigger a stress response similar to facing a direct threat leading to anxiety and helplessness
3 Is it normal to feel this way
Absolutely Feeling overwhelmed anxious sad or numb is a normal human reaction to abnormal sustained stress You are not alone many people are experiencing this crisis fatigue
4 Whats the difference between normal worry and something more serious like anxiety or depression
Normal worry comes and goes and you can still function It may become more serious if feelings are constant interfere with daily life cause physical symptoms or include persistent hopelessness If youre concerned speaking to a doctor or therapist is a good step
5 Whats one simple thing I can do right now to feel a bit better
Practice a news diet Consciously limit your consumption of crisis news Set specific times to check reputable sources and turn off notifications Replace that time with an activity you enjoy
Advanced Practical Questions
6 How can I stay informed without becoming paralyzed by doomscrolling
Adopt intentional media habits Choose 12 trusted sources for brief daily updates Follow solutionsfocused journalism or constructive news outlets that report on problems and responses Schedule your information intake dont let it be a default activity
7 I feel guilty for focusing on my own wellbeing when the world is suffering How do I manage that
Think of it like the oxygen mask on a plane you must secure your own first to effectively help others Sustainable action requires a stable foundation Selfcare isnt selfish it
