Why It Always Feels Like the End of the World

A Stoic’s Guide to the Doom Cycle

I’m bestselling indie writer Teague de La Plaine. This is my weekly newsletter, where I talk about writing and self-publishing in addition to my own life. I keep the newsletter free, because I prefer you spend your money on my books.

“The world is always ending somewhere.”
— Don DeLillo

If you’ve ever caught yourself thinking, These are the worst of times, congratulations: you’re not crazy, you’re just alive.

Every generation feels it. That gnawing, slow-burn dread. The sense that something is unraveling. That this, whatever “this” is, can’t possibly continue. Whether it’s the climate, the debt, the polarization, the war, the AI, or just the thousand unread emails in your inbox, there’s always something whispering that the cliff edge is closer than we think.

But here’s the twist: it’s not new. In fact, it’s as old as history.

The Doom Loop

We think of progress as a line. A slow march from the caves to the stars and beyond. But lived experience isn’t linear—it’s a loop. A cycle of struggle and peace, fear and hope, collapse and rebirth. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the way we talk about now.

We say, “The world’s never been this divided,” but Cicero said the same in the Roman Senate before they knifed Caesar. We say, “We’re losing faith in institutions,” but that line could’ve been ripped from a broadsheet in 1789, 1861, 1917, or 1968.

What we’re experiencing is the same storm with different waves. And the more you study the cycles, the more familiar it all becomes.

The Fourth Turning

Let’s start with the big one: generational theory.

Historians William Strauss and Neil Howe wrote a book called The Fourth Turning. The central idea? Societies move in roughly 80- to 100-year cycles, broken into four “turnings”:

1. High – a post-crisis world of unity and strength.

2. Awakening – cultural revolution and spiritual upheaval.

3. Unraveling – rising individualism, weakening trust.

4. Crisis – breakdown, chaos…and then rebirth.

According to their math, we’re now in the fourth turning. Again.

The last one was the Great Depression and WWII. Before that: the Civil War. Before that: the American Revolution. Roughly every 80–100 years, the wheels come off—and we rebuild.

But here’s the catch: during the third turning, everyone feels it. The sense of unraveling, that civilization is corroding from the inside, that people are too selfish, the leaders too corrupt, the culture too confused. It always feels like that.

And every time, some people think this is the end of the road. But it never is. It’s just the end of a chapter.

Turchin, Cliodynamics, and the Math of Collapse

Peter Turchin is a scientist who decided to treat history like data. He invented a field called cliodynamics, and in 2010 he publicly predicted that the 2020s would bring a surge of political instability in the U.S.

Why? Because he saw patterns: rising inequality, elite overproduction (too many ambitious people chasing too few elite roles), political polarization, and declining trust. These trends, he argued, don’t just appear once. They come in waves, about every 50 years or so.

Turchin’s model isn’t perfect, but it rhymes with Strauss and Howe. It echoes the same insight: societies aren't engines of endless growth—they're living organisms. And sometimes, they get sick.

Eternal September

It’s not just history. It’s perception.

In 1993, AOL opened its floodgates and dumped the masses onto the internet. Up until that point, the internet was an academic curiosity, full of forums, civility, and niche communities. Every September, a wave of new students would show up, fumble around, and learn the rules.

But after AOL, that wave never stopped. The newcomers didn’t leave. The internet forgot how to self-regulate. They called it Eternal September—an inside joke turned cultural shift.

Now, zoom out: that’s us.

We’re living in a kind of eternal apocalypse. Every day the headlines scream. The feed scrolls. The vibes rot. It never ends. Social media has turned our fear center into a dopamine-chasing algorithm. There’s no closure. No cooldown.

Just more.

Hope and Despair Are Roommates

It’s tempting to think we’re unique, that things have never been this bad. Or this scary. But the truth is, the human condition is a balancing act between hope and despair.

One generation is building the interstate highway system. The next is protesting Vietnam. One is putting men on the moon. The next is marching for civil rights. One is inventing the internet. The next is dealing with its fallout.

We carry both.

Every moment in history is a paradox of breakthrough and breakdown, of tragedy and triumph.

The moon landing happened in the same year as the Manson murders.

We freed the slaves and then built Jim Crow.

We cracked the atom and built Hiroshima.

The internet gave us Wikipedia…and Facebook.

Same coin. Different sides.

Photo by Sam Szuchan on Unsplash

The Stoic Antidote

So, what do we do with this? Just white-knuckle it through history until the next rebirth?

Not quite.

The Stoics had a better answer: perspective.

“You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
— Marcus Aurelius

The world has always been in turmoil. That’s not a flaw—it’s a feature. Chaos isn’t a bug in the code; it is the code.

Our job isn’t to escape it. Our job is to show up with a steady hand on the tiller.

Marcus wrote Meditations while governing a crumbling Roman Empire during plague and war. He knew despair. But he didn’t flinch.

The antidote to doom isn’t denial. It’s discipline.

You get up. You do your work. You keep your mind clean. You stay kind. And you hold the rope, even when the storm rips through the rigging.

The Present Isn't Worse—Just Louder

We are not the first to feel this way. But we are the first to feel it this often, this loudly, and this globally.

We carry the weight of the world in our pockets. Every injustice, every tragedy, every tweet, every collapse: it all finds us.

It’s no wonder we’re exhausted.

But there’s a difference between information and truth.

The truth is that we are neither alone, nor doomed, and certainly not powerless.

Yes, things are broken. But they’ve been broken before. And every generation figures out how to keep going. We will too.

Why It Always Feels Like the End of the World

Because every age has its horsemen.

Because every generation thinks it’s the last sane one.

Because memory fades and fear doesn’t.

Because the future is always uncertain, and the present is always personal.

But mostly…because we care.

We care about what happens. We care about our kids. We care about the planet, about justice, about dignity. And that caring—that deep ache for things to be better—is not a weakness. It’s a feature of the human spirit.

It’s what keeps us from giving up. From turning inward. From saying, “Screw it.”

We feel like the world is ending because part of us still believes it can be saved.

And that’s not the end—it's the beginning.

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