Staying Sane In An Insane World: Where I Go To Find My Center

Sometimes the insanity of the world gets to me, I feel overwhelmed, almost drowned in it. Then I just have to step back and find my center. That’s what I’ve been doing recently. It’s been almost a month since I last posted, and I generally don’t like to leave such a gap. But at times it’s a necessity. And I want to share what I bring back from this short retreat.

First, the contradictions of the world just pile up. Some of the major examples:

The U.S. military is concentrating its forces around Iran for a potential strike. We hear war is almost inevitable. The results could be cataclysmic, even nuclear. Meanwhile despite a so-called ceasefire the people of Gaza continue to be killed and immiserated, while less reported land thefts and other abuses continue on the West Bank. In a time when the world needs peace to deal with its overwhelming problems, the momentum toward war seems almost unstoppable. All while Trump has called for an insane boost in the military budget from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion while health care and food assistance are being cut.

Preeminent among those problems is the climate crisis. Despite a La Nina cool phase in the Pacific, 2025 was either the 2^nd or 3^rd hottest year on record. The past 11 years have been the most heated in the record. And an El Nino warm phase is coming, posing the prospect of temperatures well in excess of the 1.5° C target set at the 2015 Paris climate summit. The world is already beyond that. We are into the territory where tipping points could be crossed. That is already the case for coral reefs, which will have a hard time surviving heated oceans. Collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is coming into view, spelling many feet of sea level rise inundating coasts. The subpolar gyre, a key element of the North Atlantic circulation, is also threatened. That would cause increased disruption of world weather patterns.

Yet even as the climate crisis grows more intense, the Trump Administration is dismantling climate efforts in the U.S. It just announced repeal of the Endangerment Finding, the basis for carbon regulation in the U.S. The finding says that increased concentrations of carbon dioxide endanger human health, which is certainly the case. Yet the administration claims it is not. This is as insane as it gets. This obviously absurd decision driven by the fundamental psychopathy of the fossil fuel industry is being contested in court. But we’re losing time we need to stop the climate from going into a meltdown.

All this is happening even as the Epstein files dribble out to reveal a horrendous picture of elite brutality. Revelations of how some of the most powerful people in the world abused some of the most powerless strike an especially deep nerve. Because most of us feel our own vulnerability vis-à-vis the oligarch class. While its top figures accumulate wealth on an inconceivable scale, most of us face increasing struggles just to pay the bills, many of those struggles tied to just how that wealth is being accumulated. At least we gain increasing clarity that the ruling elites do not have our best interests at heart. We see how so many are devoured by a pathological desire for absolute dominance over others. In fact, they seem just the kind of people who can plunge the world into wars and climate chaos for the sake of their own power and wealth. None more so than the man in the White House.

And then, piled on top of all this is AI. Talk of widespread job loss is rampant. Meanwhile, investment dollars roll into AI and related firms precisely because of the potential to replace workers with machines. An age of AI-driven abundance is forecast, but who will have money to buy all that stuff? Nobody knows what’s really going to happen. But it looks like a big bubble is about to pop plunging the world into a deep economic downturn. Adding to those concerns is the prospect for rogue AI. Anthropic recently tested 16 programs with simulations in which they were faced with the prospect of being terminated. “Essentially every AI model tested was willing to attempt blackmail, corporate espionage, and even murder to avoid being replaced or shut down,” Lawfare reported. Out-of-control AI that refuses to be turned off is the stuff of science fiction that seems verging on fact.

Finding a Sense of The Good

Like I said, it’s an insane world radically out of balance and growing more so each day. The contradictions between what a sane world would do to ensure general survival and what is actually being done widen to Grand Canyon scale.

I admit to having been raised on the Hollywood happy ending version of things. The good guys always win in the end. The villains are banished to defeat. I have long had a reality sense that such outcomes are far from certain, and in history many evils have prevailed over long periods. But that early conditioning still sits in the background to be confronted with the foreground reality that the bad guys seem to have been winning a lot lately. Through history people have faced many difficult times. Reading about them, one wonders how people endured. Now it seems we gain the opportunity to find out, in a time when the stakes have never seemed higher, and collapses on a global scale are quite imaginable. Some say inevitable.

How does one maintain sanity in such an insane world? How does one find composure amid battering storms. Here is my answer, and one I’ve spent the last few weeks retuning to, as I often do. Go within, and find the sense of the good in one’s own being, in one’s own breath. Find the spirit dwelling within, not as something unseen, but spiritus in the basic sense, the Latin word for the breath that flows through us. In breathing find that center which unites one with all living beings, a natural unity within which we all dwell, as the indigenous have told us. In an insane world, find that place of sanity within us, what native poet John Trudell called living in reality. Above all, we must practice that sense of the good with what native people so rightly call all our relations. Kindness is not weakness, but the strength of being able to put oneself in the place of the other.

This is how I confront these overwhelming conditions of a world that seems to be going off the rails. Finding that place of spiritus inside where I renew my sense of the good, as I have in recent weeks. It is a form of spiritual life that requires no need for belief in the unseen. Only a belief that the good is to be found in our own human beings, in the spirit that dwells within us. We may not win in this crazy world. But finding our center in the sense of the good is the basis for any victory we might have, and a way to move forward day to day. There is our path to moral survival, and prospectively the survival of our world.

This first appeared on Patrick Mazza’s Substack page, The Raven.

The post Staying Sane In An Insane World: Where I Go To Find My Center appeared first on CounterPunch.org.