The antidote to perma-dread
Once upon a post–Cold War time up until the late 2000s, we called the world VUCA — volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. If you used the word a lot in the context of business, you probably went through the crashes, shakedowns, almost-recessions, bubbles, and recoveries that made the headlines.
VUCA was a useful label until it got disrupted (well, a little).
Jamais Cascio, an American futurist, coined a new term in 2020: BANI — brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible. He argued that VUCA had become too ubiquitous. BANI, on the other hand, captured our emotional chaos— the anxious realization that the systems we rely on (supply chains, democracies, even daily routines) are fragile as hell.
Just. Yikes.
And then in 2022, Oxford crowned “permacrisis” as its word of the year, a nod to the never-ending soup of instability, where crises overlap and amplify each other. There are so many ways to label this era. VUCA. BANI. Permacrisis.
For millennials who are just trying to live a life, this has been the emotional flavor of our adulthood: a constant low-key dread, with the occasional, full-blown what the actual f***, the world is a hot mess.
In simple everyday terms: “Should I get mad over the price of onions today, or do I have enough bandwidth to nurse my climate anxiety?”
But there’s something I learned that helped me calm the f*** down a little bit.
A University of Chicago researcher named Suzanne Kobasa introduced the idea of cognitive hardiness as early as the 1970s. It is a resilience trait found in people who handle stress well. It boils down to three Cs:
Commitment – Staying curious. Choosing to stay engaged, even when things are absurd
Control – Believing you can influence how things play out (at least a little)
Challenge – Seeing change not as a threat, but as the baseline state of being
I discovered this concept in 2019, and it became my anchor during the pandemic. Especially the last C: Challenge.
Accepting that change is the norm flips your perspective. It makes the chaos feel less personal. Less like you’re failing, and more like yas, this is just what it means to be alive right now.
It also helps you reframe discomfort as data — signals about what in your system needs reinforcing, or rethinking.
And it nudges you to find your people — the challenge-positive ones. The experimenters, side questers, open collaborators who try things just because they’re curious.
The ones who don’t need complete information to move forward.
The ones who have just enough energy to try.