Navigating the Noise: Finding Clarity in an Overwhelming World

What a relentless and bewildering start to 2025.

Palisades Fire (By FireEditorHomiee – Own work, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Wildfires ripping through Los Angeles’s Palisades, ignited by rogue New Year’s fireworks, with then President-Elect Trump pinning the blame on Governor ‘Newscum’ Newsom.

A Gaza ceasefire and hostage swap that sparked hope—but continues to bring anguish and ongoing uncertainty.

China released its drastically cheaper alternative to ChatGPT—DeepSeek—tanking Nvidia’s stock by almost $600 billion, the worst single-day plunge in U.S. history.

The ante then upped, with Zelensky goading Trump, Vance and Russia in a televised Oval Office showdown that felt like a prelude to World War III—dividing opinions and deepening the global rift.

Ukrainian President Zelensky clashes with President Trump and Vice President JD Vance during meeting in Oval Office on Feb. 28, 2025 (Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)

And just when you thought it all couldn’t get any stranger, Texas scientists edged closer to recreating woolly mammoths, dodos and Tasmanian tigers!

If 2025’s opening acts prove anything, it’s that keeping up is not only exhausting, overwhelming and utterly confounding, it’s almost impossible. So how do we find clarity in this unrelenting cycle of change and chaos?

A Macro Perspective

Step back from the relentless tumult, and the search for humanity’s purpose reveals itself to be akin to Don Quixote tilting at windmills—noble, chaotic, but ever-elusive.

Humanity’s tilt at the elusive windmills. (Illustration by George A. Harker, via Wikicommons)

This panoply of weird and dangerous events appears to defy any rational assessment. Yuval Noah Harari might argue DeepSeek’s emergence is more than a stock market jolt—in Nexus he cautions that our tools could outpace our wisdom, and with China unleashing this AI amid shaky security, privacy gaps and censorship red flags, it’s a colossal leap into the unknown. This AI surge, the raging wildfires, the geopolitical knife-edge we’re teetering on, the flood of online vitriol and praise following Trump’s speech to Congress – these events all send our world into a dizzying spiral as we scramble to keep up and make sense of it all. Zelensky’s historic Oval Office appearance marked a pinnacle in this unholy marriage between the technology that is meant to serve us and our capacity for chaos, even thirst for it (I mean, did anyone think to suggest, “BEHIND CLOSED DOORS, GENTLEMEN!”?). Clarity is elusive when the pace accelerates and the noise, as Nexus warns, grows deafening.

Quote from ‘Nexus’, by Yuval Noah Harari. (Image by author)

Psychologist Steven Pinker offers a calmer view. In The Better Angels of our Nature he argues we’ve weathered darker storms – horrendous violence, religious wars – and still forged progress. Wildfires and now cyclones off Australia’s east coast, where I write this, fuel “Climate Catastrophe” headlines, while the geopolitical flare-ups – like Putin’s invasion and the crisis in Gaza – suggest a nature, both physical and tribal, that keeps dividing us. Yet those woolly mammoths and Tasmanian tigers inching back into existence via a Texan laboratory show we’re not just immensely capable of destroying things—we seemingly have the talent to bring species back from extinction! Pinker’s wager is that progress endures — our era is less violent, less cruel and more peaceful than any previous period of human existence — but it’s hindered by daily catastrophes and threats like that of World War III. Maybe clarity lies not in the daily grind but in the long game.

Quote from ‘Better Angels’, by Steven Pinker. (Image by author)

Biologist Jeremy Griffith digs deeper, suggesting the chaos outside is just a reflection of the struggle within. Griffith, whom I consider an exceptional holistic thinker, actually spent six years combing the Tasmanian wilderness for its lost tiger (the Thylacine) – conducting the most thorough search ever undertaken, only to conclude its extinction in 1973 – yet he’d argue that resurrecting species sidesteps the real crisis: our unresolved, destructive, divided nature, the very cause of so many extinctions. In FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition, he frames our turmoil – the political clash between the Right and the Left, cultural divides expanding globally, the mental health epidemic – as echoes of an ancient tension between our instinct and intellect. The chaos of 2025 isn’t just a series of random events unrelated to who we are; it’s us writ large, wrestling with a human condition that fuels conflict and confusion. What we see in the world are symptoms of the real issue – which is us. Griffith posits that understanding this is the key to unlocking a way forward. He suggests

Solving the human condition solves all the confusion, frustration and suffering in human life at its source.

Maybe clarity isn’t about trying to make sense of headlines, but confronting what drives them—a reckoning as old as we are.

Quote from ‘Freedom’, by Jeremy Griffith. (Image by author)

The World Transformation Movement—A Potential Roadmap

If we want to truly address and calm the chaos around us, we need to confront its source: the forces within us that drive division and destruction. The World Transformation Movement (WTM), which I’ve mentioned in a previous article, advocates Jeremy Griffith’s work, arguing that the key to solving humanity’s greatest challenges lies in understanding the human condition itself.

By tackling the psychological conflicts that fuel our turmoil, the WTM envisions a world where insight replaces confusion, where understanding dissolves conflict, and where genuine connection triumphs over division. Griffith’s work isn’t just an analysis – it’s a roadmap to a future free from the cycles of conflict and confusion that have shaped history.

Final Thoughts

So, as Cyclone Alfred bears down on Australia’s eastern seaboard, it’s time to turn my mind to the present, batten down the hatches, and reflect on that great maxim written on Apollo’s temple so long ago: “Man, know thyself.”

‘Know Thyself’ at the Temple of Apollo. (Image by author)