There’s a specific kind of cognitive exhaustion that sets in when too many things that should not be possible keep happening anyway. Not the regular tired of paying attention to politics. But something that makes it hard to explain to people who aren’t feeling it, because the scale of what you’re trying to hold doesn’t fit neatly into a conversation.
For most of the last eighty years, Americans across generations grew up inside a version of reality where certain things held. Institutions were imperfect but largely functional. Power changed hands through elections. Courts issued rulings that were followed. Wars required at least a performance of congressional debate. Change happened, sometimes painfully slowly and sometimes not at all for people on the margins, but it moved through recognizable channels at a pace the human mind could track.
That was the baseline. And depending on when you were born, that baseline shaped your understanding of what normal looks like, what’s alarming versus what’s just politics, and how much weight a given piece of news should carry. Boomers grew up watching Watergate resolve through the system working. Gen X came of age during the relative procedural stability of the eighties and nineties, even through turbulent moments. Millennials and Gen Z inherited a world where the edges were already fraying, where trust in institutions was already declining, but the basic architecture still seemed to be standing.
What’s happening now is not a stress test of that architecture. It’s something closer to a demolition, and the reason people of different ages are reacting so differently is that they’re measuring it against completely different baselines of what was supposed to be possible.
Human beings are wired for a particular scale of reality. Our threat detection systems evolved to handle things we could see coming, things within our immediate community, things with a clear cause and possible response. What we are living through right now operates on a completely different scale, moving faster than our cognition can move, and doing so continuously without pause.
But you still have to live your life. You still have kids to get to school and work to show up for life. So the question isn’t whether this is a lot. It clearly is. The question is how to stay upright inside it.
Let’s start by naming just a portion of what we’re dealing with.
1. Twenty-Six Executive Orders on Day One
On January 20, 2025, before most people had finished watching the inauguration, 26 executive orders were signed, the most ever signed on a first day in American history. Analysts described it as a “shock and awe” campaign, and that framing was accurate. Nearly two-thirds of those orders mirrored proposals from Project 2025, the 900-page governing blueprint that the administration spent years publicly denying any connection to.
In one day, the legal landscape shifted on immigration, civil rights protections, federal employment, transgender rights, environmental policy, and more. Not gradually. Not through legislation that moved through debate and committee. But in a single afternoon.
The reason this belongs at the top of the list is not just what the orders contained. It’s the pace. The human brain processes change incrementally. It needs time to register what happened, assess what it means, and recalibrate. Twenty-six orders in one day was a deliberate denial of that process, and it set the tempo for everything that followed.
For older generations who watched major policy shifts take years to move through Congress, who remember when a single controversial executive order would generate months of national debate, the speed alone was disorienting in a way that’s hard to articulate. For younger people who had already grown up watching institutions erode gradually, it confirmed something they had suspected for a while but hoped wasn’t quite true yet. Either way, the message was the same: the rules about how fast this can move no longer apply.
2. Handing DOGE the Keys to the Country’s Financial Infrastructure
Also in early 2025, the Department of Government Efficiency, which is not actually a department, not actually a government agency, and not actually accountable to any oversight structure, was granted access to the payment and data systems managed by the Treasury Department, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
Read that again slowly.
A private operation, run by the wealthiest individual on the planet, was handed access to the financial infrastructure that processes payments for tens of millions of Americans, including Social Security checks, Medicare reimbursements, and Medicaid disbursements. No public vote. No Senate confirmation. No transparent authorization process that the public could see or challenge.
The sheer normalizing speed at which this was reported and then moved past in the news cycle is its own form of insanity. In any other context, in any previous administration of either party, this would have been the singular defining scandal of an entire presidency. It happened in the first weeks of this one, and the next thing was already happening before anyone could finish processing it.
3. Deporting People to a Foreign Prison in Defiance of a Federal Judge
In March 2025, more than 200 people were loaded onto planes and sent to CECOT, a maximum security prison in El Salvador known internationally for its brutal conditions. The majority of them had no criminal record. The deportations were carried out under the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law last used to justify the forced internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
A federal judge issued an order to stop the flights. The planes took off anyway.
When the administration was asked about defying a direct federal court order, the response was not an apology or a legal argument. It was a shrug. The Justice Department argued that the president can unilaterally deport anyone he wants without any statutory authority, that the courts have no jurisdiction over the decision, and that it was already done so there was nothing to address.
The people on those planes are still there. There has been no due process. There has been no accountability. And the precedent that was set, that a sitting administration can openly defy a federal judge and face no consequence, is one that does not get walked back easily once it’s been established.
4. Dismantling USAID in Six Weeks
The United States Agency for International Development had been operating for over sixty years. It ran HIV/AIDS prevention programs that kept millions of people alive. It provided disaster relief, famine response, clean water infrastructure, and humanitarian aid in active conflict zones around the world. It was imperfect, like any institution, but it was also one of the primary mechanisms through which the United States maintained relationships, influence, and basic moral credibility in the world.
In six weeks, 83% of its programs were eliminated. Contracts were cancelled mid-delivery. Food aid was stopped with shipments already in transit. Health workers in the field found out their programs were terminated via form email. People who had been relying on those programs, in some cases for survival, were given no transition plan and no warning.
The argument offered was that it was wasteful spending that didn’t serve American interests. The reality is that public health infrastructure, famine prevention, and disaster response in fragile regions directly affects global stability, refugee flows, and the conditions that create security threats. Dismantling it in six weeks, without assessment, without transition planning, without any coherent replacement strategy, was not efficiency. It was demolition.
5. The War with Iran
On February 28, 2026, the United States in coordination with Israel launched nearly 900 strikes in 12 hours against Iran, targeting missiles, air defenses, military infrastructure, and government leadership. The opening wave of strikes assassinated Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei along with dozens of other senior officials. A missile also struck a girls’ school adjacent to a naval base, killing approximately 170 civilians, most of whom were children.
There was no formal declaration of war. There was no congressional authorization. Negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program had been ongoing, with a fourth round of talks scheduled for the week after the strikes began. The administration launched the attacks anyway, during active diplomacy, under the code name Operation Epic Fury.
Iran responded by launching retaliatory missile and drone strikes against U.S. military bases, embassies, and oil infrastructure across the Middle East, and closed the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most critical shipping corridors in the world, disrupting global trade. As of the first week of May 2026, at least 16 American military sites have been damaged, making up the majority of U.S. positions in the region. The conflict has expanded into Lebanon, drawn in U.S. allies across the Gulf, and sparked a fragile ceasefire that is already showing cracks.
This is not a concluded event. It is an active war, ongoing right now, that began without the consent of Congress, during negotiations, with civilian casualties in the opening hours. And it landed in a news cycle that already had seventeen other things happening the same week, which is part of why the full weight of it has been so difficult for people to absorb.
Why You Can’t Stop Feeling Like You’re Losing It
Here’s what’s actually happening in your body and brain when you try to keep up with all of this. Your nervous system has a threat response that was built for a very different world. It’s good at handling immediate, concrete danger: something scary happens, you respond, the threat resolves, you recover. What it was not built for is continuous, ambient, high-stakes, unresolvable threat coming from multiple directions simultaneously with no clear endpoint.
When threat signals don’t resolve, the nervous system stays activated. Over time that activation becomes the baseline, which means you’re running on stress hormones that were designed to be temporary, and your brain is allocating cognitive resources toward threat monitoring that would otherwise go toward focus, creativity, memory, and emotional regulation. This is why everything feels harder right now. It’s resource depletion.
Add to that the scale mismatch: each of the five things above is, individually, a historically significant event. Any one of them would have dominated news cycles for months in a previous era. All five happened within roughly thirteen months, alongside dozens of other significant actions. The human brain simply cannot give each of them the processing time they warrant. So instead it does something called psychic numbing, a well-documented phenomenon where the sheer volume of information causes emotional response to flatten. You stop feeling as much, not because you care less, but because the system is protecting itself from overload.
That numbing can feel like apathy, and it isn’t. It’s a coping mechanism, and like most coping mechanisms it has costs.
This is also part of why the generational divide in how people are responding to this moment is so stark and so frustrating on all sides. Older people who lived through the Cold War, through Vietnam, through Watergate, through the AIDS crisis, through 9/11, have a deep well of experience that tells them things can get very bad and still eventually stabilize. That’s not naivety. That’s a pattern their lived experience taught them. But those stabilizations happened inside a system that was still fundamentally intact, and what’s different now is that the system itself is what’s being dismantled. Younger generations who never had the same faith in institutions to begin with are often less surprised but more exhausted, because they’ve been watching this coming for longer than anyone wanted to admit. Neither response is wrong. They’re just calibrated to different versions of what was supposed to hold.
How to Actually Hold This
The goal here is not to feel fine about things that are not fine. The goal is to stay functional, stay present in your actual life, and stay engaged at whatever level is sustainable for you over the long term, not just in the hot moments.
Triage your attention deliberately.
You cannot hold all of these things or the plethora of other events of this shit show at equal weight simultaneously and remain functional. Choose what you’re going to track closely, what you’re going to stay generally informed about, and what you’re going to let pass through without deep engagement. This is not avoidance. It’s resource management. A person who is tracking one thing closely and taking action is more effective than a person who is overwhelmed by all of it and paralyzed.
Distinguish between consuming and processing.
Reading more articles about the same event is not the same as processing what you already know. At some point, adding more information stops being useful and starts being a way to stay in the anxiety loop without moving through it. When you notice you’re searching for more coverage of something you already understand, that’s usually a sign that what you need is not more information but time to sit with what you already have.
Give your body something concrete to do.
Outrage that lives only in your head turns into anxiety. Outrage that moves through your body, into action, into community, into creative expression, into direct engagement, metabolizes differently. It doesn’t have to be large. It has to be real. Show up somewhere. Make something. Call someone. Contribute to something that is actively pushing back. The doing is not just politically useful. It is physiologically regulating.
Protect the ordinary parts of your life fiercely.
The ordinary things, your morning, your meals, your relationships, your routines, the small pleasures that make a day feel like yours, are not trivial in a moment like this. They are the infrastructure of your capacity to keep going. Letting the chaos colonize every part of your daily life doesn’t make you more engaged or more serious. It just makes you less capable. Guard the ordinary parts. They are holding you up.
Let yourself be angry without letting it run the whole show.
Anger is appropriate here. Some of what is happening deserves sustained, clear-eyed fury. But anger as a permanent operating state is corrosive, and it tends to narrow rather than expand your sense of what’s possible. Feel it fully, use it as fuel for whatever action you’re taking, and then put it down. Not forever. Just for the parts of the day that belong to the rest of your life.
Find the people who are paying attention and stay close to them.
One of the most destabilizing things about this moment is the social fragmentation around it, the sense that you’re seeing something clearly that people around you aren’t registering the same way. That isolation is its own tax on your mental health. Seek out the people who are awake to what’s happening, who can hold the weight of it without collapsing under it, who are still laughing and living and fighting. Community is not a comfort measure. It is a survival structure.
The Point Is Not to Go Numb
Going numb is the other failure mode, the one on the opposite end from overwhelm. It looks like not caring anymore, scrolling past things that would have stopped you cold a year ago, a kind of flat exhaustion where the outrage has simply run out.
If you’re there, that’s information too. It means you’ve been running on empty and the system shut down to protect itself. The answer is not to force yourself to feel more. It’s to rest, reconnect, restore, and come back when you have something to come back with.
This is a long game. The people who are going to matter in it over the next several years are the ones who figured out how to be in it sustainably, not the ones who burned the hottest in the first year and had nothing left.
Part of playing that long game is understanding that different generations are going to move through this differently, and that’s not a fault line to fight across. The person in your life who seems too calm probably isn’t indifferent. They’re drawing on a longer history of watching bad things eventually shift. The person who seems like they can’t stop spiraling probably isn’t being dramatic. They’re carrying something that younger generations have known for a while and that the current moment just made impossible to deny. Finding ways to stay connected across that gap, to share what each generation actually knows rather than dismissing each other’s responses, is part of the longer work. The calm and the urgency both have something the other needs.
Take care of yourself like that’s true. Because it is.
