At 22 I read a book that told me the world was more fragile than I thought.
It was right.
But the lesson I took from it was wrong, and it cost me years.
Emergency by Neil Strauss began as a personal crisis.
After 9/11 and the looting in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he went from rock star biographer to survivalist — learning to live without electricity, slaughter a goat, get a second passport, and defend himself if necessary.
His conclusion: most people are completely unprepared for a world that can come apart faster than anyone expects.
I understood that at 22. Then I spent the next several years proving it in the worst possible way.
The spiral
Instead of preparing, I started consuming news obsessively.
Refreshing. Refreshing. Refreshing.
I stopped trusting the mainstream outlets — they seemed to curate the truth rather than report it. So I went deeper down the rabbit hole. I may have gotten closer to what I was looking for. But the further I went, the heavier it got.
It became a depressive, years-long spiral that felt like staying informed but was actually just anxiety wearing a productive mask.
I was "informed." Yet less informed about what actually mattered than ever.
The book had asked me to build capability. I had built dread instead.
Strauss was right
The deep optimism of the post-Cold War 1990s: when the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed, crime rates dropped, and the West entered its longest economic boom in living memory...
...that's all long gone.
The world Strauss warned about is here.
A war in the Middle East nobody can afford to lose. Oil prices spiking through a choked Strait of Hormuz. A US national debt approaching $39 trillion. Gold at all-time highs.
The average household squeezed from every direction at once.
I don't write this to create panic. I write it because Strauss wasn't paranoid. He just saw it coming.
And consuming that information endlessly didn't prepare me for any of it.
The difference between knowing the world is fragile and actually doing something about it is everything.
And I had spent years on the wrong side of that line.
Memento mori
The ancient Stoics had a practice called memento mori. Meaning remember that you will die.
Not as a threat. As a tool. A way of asking: if time is finite, what are you actually doing with it?
Around 25, I had a feeling I would die young. I didn't know how. Just that it would happen — and that I was wasting whatever time I had left refreshing news feeds that made me feel worse and changed nothing.
So after years of passive consumption, I made what felt like my last real decision.
I adopted a big sled dog named Kycha. She was barely eighteen months old and still full of puppy energy. She wanted nothing more than to run and walk and smell and explore the world outside.
So that's what we did together.
The world started looking different from ground level — in the cold air, with a large animal who needed me to keep moving regardless of what was happening on the political level.
The massive weight I'd accumulated during my depression began to drop. Twenty-four kilograms in months (aka 53 lbs). And my mindset started to feel as light as my body now did.
Kycha didn't fix the world. She fixed my relationship to it.
That's what the book had been trying to tell me all along. Not to fear the fragility, but to stop being fragile yourself.
What Emergency actually teaches
The book was never about fear.
It was about capability.
Strauss didn't spend his years doom-scrolling about societal collapse. He learned to drive a motorcycle. Got a medical license. Studied wilderness survival. Acquired dual citizenship. He built skills that would make him useful in a world that had stopped being predictable.
I finally understand what he was actually asking for.
Building an investment system — index funds, gold, crypto — so my family has a floor beneath them regardless of what happens next. Doing 600+ days of daily physical training so my body is a tool I can rely on. Publishing every day for nearly two years so my thinking sharpens and my skills compound.
These aren't hobbies. They're the answer to a fragile world.
The wars, the debt, the instability... it's all real.
But the answer to uncertainty was never more information. It was always more capability. More self-reliance. More rootedness in the things you can actually do something about.
Kycha taught me that before any system or strategy did.
The Stoics would have understood her perfectly.
She did what memento mori is supposed to do: she pulled me out of my head and back into the one life I actually have.
P.S. One of the biggest bottlenecks between where you are and where you want to be isn't information: it's clarity on what to actually do first.
Take the 9-5 Escape Quiz at uglyemails dot com. In 3 minutes it shows you your exact bottleneck and what to fix before anything else. I built it because I spent years informed about all the wrong things.
