The Still Point: Finding a Way to Live When the World Is Going to Hell

12 minutes read time.

There is a quiet and pervasive anxiety settling over modern life, a cross-generational malaise born from the growing chasm between the lives we were promised and the ones we are actually living. For older generations, the miracle of longevity has been shadowed by the fear of outliving their savings, of facing a prolonged twilight of disease and disability rather than a golden age of retirement. For younger generations, the traditional life script has been rendered nearly illegible; college degrees no longer guarantee stable careers, homeownership feels like a fantasy for a vanishing few, and the economic pressures of raising a family have become crushingly immense. Teenagers, looking at the precarious existence of recent graduates, are gripped by a new fear: the fear of ever having to leave the relative safety of school for a world of diminished prospects.

We are living in a state of profound societal friction, where the established pillars of a meaningful life—career, financial security, a predictable future—are eroding beneath our feet. In the midst of this wreckage, we are engaged in a desperate, often unspoken, search for some semblance of sanity, for something that does more than just make us smile, but allows us to go to bed at night with a genuine sense of accomplishment and peace. We know, instinctively, that life must be more than the Sisyphean struggle for a career and a mortgage, but how to assemble a fulfilling existence from the scattered pieces is a mystery we are having trouble cracking. The solution, it seems, lies not in chasing the old promises more aggressively, but in a radical shift of perspective—a turn away from external validation and toward an internal sense of agency, a rejection of performative productivity in favor of true leisure, and the cultivation of an ancient virtue that may be the only durable anchor in a chaotic world: integrity.

The Scapegoat and the Sleuth – An Allegory for a World in Crisis

The nature of our collective response to this slow-burning crisis is powerfully allegorized in the world of horror cinema, a genre uniquely attuned to the subconscious fears of a culture. In Zach Cregger’s film Weapons, a small, ordinary town is thrown into chaos when its children inexplicably vanish. The community’s reaction is not to unify and collaborate, but to fracture and seek a target for its terror and grief. They find one in Justine, a single, childless schoolteacher. She is the outsider, the one who deviates from the maternal norm, and therefore, the perfect scapegoat. She is branded a “witch,” harassed in her home, and ostracized by the very people who should be her allies. The film’s town serves as a perfect microcosm of a society under immense stress: when faced with an existential threat it cannot comprehend, its first instinct is to turn on itself, to find a simple villain rather than confront a complex problem.

This is the “hell” so many feel today. The economic and social pressures are the unexplainable, terrifying force, and the response is often not solidarity, but a splintering into camps of resentment, blame, and individualized paranoia. The protagonist, Justine, embodies the individual struggling within this breakdown. Stripped of her professional standing, her social connections, and her sense of safety, her life has been systematically dismantled. Yet, it is at this nadir that she finds a path forward. Her salvation comes not from trying to win back the community’s approval or restoring her old life, but by seizing her own agency. She stops being a passive victim of the town’s hysteria and takes it upon herself to “play the sleuth,” embarking on a personal mission to discover the truth behind the children’s disappearance.

In doing so, she finds a new purpose that exists entirely outside of the failed social and professional structures that have rejected her. This act of taking control, of defining one’s own mission, is a foundational element of psychological resilience. A vast body of research in psychology, particularly over the last five years, has reinforced the importance of an “internal locus of control”—the belief that one can influence events and their outcomes. Studies of young adults navigating the “polycrisis” era of the 2020s consistently show that individuals who actively cultivate a sense of agency, even through small, manageable tasks, report significantly lower levels of anxiety and depression. Justine’s journey from scapegoat to sleuth is a potent metaphor for this process: when the world strips you of your identity, the first step toward building a better life is to assign yourself a new mission, however small.

The Tyranny of the Optimized Self – Leisure as Labor

If taking action is the first step, the nature of that action is critical. For many, especially those under 35, the instinct is to fight the chaos of the world by imposing an even more rigid order upon themselves. This phenomenon is vividly captured in the social media trend of the “5 to 9 after the 9 to 5,” where young professionals document their highly optimized, relentlessly productive leisure hours. In these mesmerizingly quick-cut videos, every moment after work is a checklist item: a precisely timed workout, a perfectly plated healthy meal, a multi-step skincare routine, a tidied kitchen. It is an attempt to wrest back a sense of control from the all-consuming demands of a career.

Yet, as The Atlantic’s analysis of this trend reveals, this approach is a trap. It is an expression of what has been termed “workism”—the modern religion that posits one’s career as the primary source of identity and life’s purpose. When work is a religion, even leisure becomes a form of piety, another domain to be optimized for maximum efficiency. The “5 to 9” routine is not an escape from the values of the workplace; it is an extension of them. This is what psychiatrist Pooja Lakshmin calls “faux self-care”: an activity that is prescribed from the outside and is a reaction to being burnt out, rather than a genuine engagement with one’s own reality. It is the act of checking boxes—yoga, meditation, journaling—not for their intrinsic value, but for the sake of having completed the task.

The German philosopher Josef Pieper identified this paradox in 1948, arguing that any activity undertaken merely for “refreshment” for work is not true leisure, but simply another form of labor. This mindset is a direct consequence of the anxieties our thesis describes. Sociological studies on burnout culture, particularly prevalent among Millennials and Gen Z, show a direct correlation between economic precarity and the compulsion to be “always on.” When your career feels unstable, you feel an intense pressure to use your “free” time to improve yourself, to build skills, to maintain a perfect home, to sculpt a perfect body—all in an effort to make yourself a more valuable commodity in a competitive market. The tragic irony is that this relentless self-optimization, this colonization of leisure by the logic of labor, is a primary driver of the very burnout it purports to solve. Conspicuously absent from most of these hyper-individualized routines is the unpredictable, inefficient, and deeply necessary element of socializing, a casualty of a culture that sees other people as an obstacle to running one’s life with the precision of a ticking watch.

The Vertical Crack – Finding Joy in the Unmeasured Moment

If the optimized “5 to 9” is a flawed solution, what does a real one look like? A separate Atlantic piece, a collection of reader-submitted “small moments of joy,” provides a powerful and practical answer. It is a catalog of real-world examples of people finding what the artist Jenny Odell calls a “vertical crack” in the horizontal tyranny of work and not-work. These are moments of “true leisure,” which Odell argues requires a kind of “emptiness in which you remember the fact of your own aliveness.”

The submissions reveal a set of common principles. The first is a deep and intentional connection with the non-transactional world, primarily nature and animals. Readers wrote of tossing peanuts to blue jays, inhaling the corn-chip scent of their dog, or simply stopping to name the specific colors of a flower. These acts connect us to a world that operates on a different logic from our own—a world of beauty and being that asks for nothing in return. Recent studies in ecopsychology have confirmed the profound benefits of even small doses of nature, or “biophilia,” in reducing cortisol levels and mitigating the symptoms of anxiety.

The second principle is the embrace of mindful rituals and small acts of creation. This is the person who intentionally “remakes” their bed each morning to “close the door” on the previous night, or the reader who finds solace in the knowledge that “each day contains exactly one first sip [of coffee] and no more.” It is the woman knitting baby socks in the Whataburger drive-through or the man listening to his song-in-progress on GarageBand while his computer reboots. These are not grand achievements, but small, creative acts that provide a sense of accomplishment and flow, states which psychologists have long identified as essential to human flourishing. They are valuable in and of themselves, their worth unmeasurable by any metric of output or productivity.

The most poignant example of this philosophy in action comes from a 79-year-old full-time caretaker for her partner of 49 years. Her life is, by her own admission, “hard and demanding work marinated in sadness.” Her solution for finding joy is not a grand escape, but a small, daily ritual: taking the dogs for a walk in the early morning. “Their wagging tails and springing steps,” she writes, “remind me that happiness lives in me as well.” This is the essence of the solution: in a world of immense and uncontrollable hardship, one can find a foothold by borrowing joy from the simple, unmeasured moments of connection that still exist.

The Still Point – Integrity as the Ultimate Anchor

This journey—from seizing agency, to rejecting false productivity, to embracing small moments of true leisure—ultimately leads to the cultivation of a foundational virtue: integrity. In a final, philosophical piece from The Atlantic, Peter Wehner explores this concept not as a single trait, but as a “synthesis of the virtues, working together to form a coherent whole.” Drawing on the Latin root integer, meaning “wholeness,” he argues that a person of integrity possesses an “inner harmony,” a consistency between their values and their behavior that allows them to be a “still point in a turning world.”

This is the ultimate answer to the problem of a world “going to hell.” External chaos—the failing economy, the political turmoil, the dissolving careers—loses much of its power to destroy us when we have a strong, coherent, and harmonious inner world. The cultivation of integrity is the process of building that inner sanctuary. When we choose to act with agency in a crisis, we are aligning our actions with a value of self-determination. When we reject “faux self-care” in favor of “true leisure,” we are aligning our actions with a value of authentic being over performative doing. When we choose to find joy in a conversation with a stranger or the beauty of a leafcutter bee’s handiwork, we are aligning ourselves with a value of connection over isolation.

Wehner argues that our modern “wreckage” is, in large part, a crisis of character, exemplified by political leaders who validate a “corrosive ethic” of cruelty and corruption. The way out, he posits, is to “rewrite the cultural script” and “make excellence in character admired again.” This is a monumental task, but he suggests it begins with small, personal acts: seeking out moral examples. These allies, he notes, can be real people in our lives, but they can also be fictional characters, like the quiet, honorable detective Christopher Foyle, whose decency provides a moral compass. This connects beautifully back to the power of small things. Finding a “brave knight” in a story is another form of “small joy,” a ritual that nurtures our “moral sense” and provides a model for how to live with integrity.

Finding Your Own Still Point

The pervasive anxiety of modern life is real and justified. The old scripts for a successful life are failing, leaving generations adrift in a sea of uncertainty. The instinct to respond with more frantic activity, more optimization, and more self-commodification is a trap that only deepens the crisis. The path to a better, more resilient life in a chaotic world is not a grand, externally prescribed solution, but a quiet, internal process of realignment. It begins with the simple, defiant act of seizing personal agency. It requires the wisdom to reject the tyranny of productivity and to seek out the “vertical cracks” of true leisure. It is built, day by day, through small, intentional rituals of joy, creation, and connection. And ultimately, it culminates in the cultivation of personal integrity—the forging of an inner wholeness so powerful and coherent that it can serve as a still point in a turning, turbulent world.