How to Keep Writing While the World is Collapsing

Yesterday, I had a terrifying dream. I was walking with my son and my wife. We were having a nice stroll when a huge bomb exploded. Everyone around us started to scream. Panic. Tears. Terror. An intensely vivid nightmare. I woke up sweating. Sad. Because what was only a dream for me has been the reality of many people in this world for decades.

When you think about the state of the world, you sit down in your chair, stare at the wall for a long time, and wonder: what’s the point? Everything is collapsing, and you’re sitting on your couch trying to write a few good words. Do they even matter? You feel ridiculous. Useless. Out of time.

Wars multiply, crises pile up, and every news headline seems to carry the same implicit message: the world is breaking. And the more the world breaks, the more writing begins to feel trivial. What is the point of lining up sentences when entire countries are burning? When children are dying? What importance can a page possibly have in a world that seems to be shaking apart?

As usual, when I am troubled, I read. And I realized that this feeling is not new. This loss of meaning, this loss of words, has been experienced by writers for centuries. The strange truth is that literature has almost never been written in perfectly peaceful times. More often than not, it was born precisely when the world was becoming uncertain.

Think about the year 536.

That year, a massive volcanic eruption threw enormous quantities of ash into the atmosphere. The sky darkened across much of the Northern Hemisphere. The Byzantine historian Procopius wrote that the sun had lost its brilliance and shone “like the moon.” For more than a year, daylight seemed pale and strange. Temperatures dropped, harvests failed, and famine spread across many regions. War, chaos, disease, and hunger… everywhere. As if a divine punishment had deprived mankind of the sun itself.

For those who lived through that time, the experience must have been terrifying. The sun seemed gone. Crops were dying, societies were weakening, and the future had become uncertain. They must have wondered: will the sun ever return? If there was ever a moment in history when humans could believe the world itself was ending, it was probably that one.

And yet, even in that darkened world, writing continued. Monks kept copying manuscripts in freezing monasteries. Chroniclers recorded the strange events unfolding around them. Thinkers continued their work. The sky had lost its light, but the work of the mind had not ceased.

This reveals something essential about writing. Writing is not a luxury reserved for peaceful times. Often, it is a response to chaos.

Throughout history, some of the most enduring works were written during periods of deep instability. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations while leading military campaigns on the borders of a fragile empire. Albert Camus wrote The Plague in a world still marked by war. Ernest Hemingway lived and wrote in a century shaped by almost constant conflict.

These writers did not wait for the world to become stable. If they had, much of their work would never have existed.

In reality, writing often becomes more necessary when the world becomes unstable. When everything around us feels chaotic, the page offers something rare: a shelter where thought can still be ordered.

The outside world may become unpredictable, but the act of writing remains simple and structured. The writer sits down, chooses one word, then another. Sentences follow one another slowly. Paragraphs take shape and ideas begin to clarify. In a way, writing becomes a form of resistance against disorder. The chaos is all around, but the writer rebuilds clarity, line by line.

During times of crisis, many people instinctively turn to writing: journals, letters, essays, stories. Writing allows us to give form to what seemed confusing. It transforms anxiety into thought.

And let us be factual: the feeling that the world is collapsing is not unique to our era. Almost every generation has experienced it.

In 1914, when the First World War began, many Europeans believed the civilization they knew was disappearing. In 1939, the shadow of global war made many people believe humanity was approaching its fall. In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the threat of nuclear war felt terrifyingly real. Propaganda everywhere. Permanent tension. It was the fear of the end that dominated daily life.

For those who lived through those moments, history seemed to be reaching a breaking point. And yet, writers kept writing. Literature exists precisely because human beings continue to think, imagine, and write even when the world appears unstable.

There is also a deeper reason why writing persists in troubled times. Words are among the few things that regularly survive the crises surrounding them.

Empires disappear. Borders change. Political systems collapse. Entire civilizations vanish. But books remain.

Even today, we still read authors who wrote more than two thousand years ago. The wars surrounding their lives disappeared long ago. The cities they lived in sometimes vanished as well. The kings they knew are forgotten. Yet their words still travel.

This perspective transforms the role of writing in difficult times. Writing is no longer an insignificant activity. It becomes one of the most durable things a person can do.

When the world becomes uncertain, writing becomes a form of time travel. A way of sending a message into the future. A way of telling those who will come after us that if they too feel the world is ending, they are not alone. That they should not lose hope. That humanity bends, but does not break.

For a writer living in troubled times, the task is not to wait for stability to return. Human history has almost never been stable. The universe has given you a role: a privileged observer capable of transmuting the world’s nuances into words.And it is not correlated to the state of the world.

It’s hard.
But your role matters.
Your task is to continue.

Continue reading.
Continue observing.
Continue thinking.
Continue sharing.
Continue writing.

Even when the world seems to be dying.
And perhaps especially then.

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