History class is just a long list of people who were sure the world was ending and then found out it wasn’t.

Every generation has been sure it was living through the final chapter, and the certainty always felt reasonable, because the evidence in front of them was genuinely frightening. Some of those stretches were terrible. None of them were the end. The pattern does not make today’s problems fake, it just argues against the feeling that nothing can be survived.

When the news gets heavy, read about a year that felt unsurvivable to the people inside it and notice what they did anyway. Then pick one thing in your own week you can actually affect.