Existential Crisis Du Jour

Oh no, not another one

Feb 22, 2026

Roll up your pants, we’ve waded into the sea of D# minor and it’s already up to our knees…

Seems like everywhere we turn there’s an existential crisis lurking. Are these real crises, or are they just shadows painted on the wall by a Banksy wannabe, startling us as we turn the corner at dusk?

Question: When is an existential crisis NOT an existential crisis?

Answer: When you’re OK with it.

Would it be so terrible if the world ended tomorrow? Possibly not. What would be terrible is if only half the world ended. Now that would be a true existential crisis, at least for those in the surviving half.

Of course, this is not new. People have been talking about the end times probably since Adam and Eve first invited the neighbors over for tea and apple turnovers.

What’s really interesting is that the pie-in-the-sky models offered us by certain ubiquitous religious organizations have been largely replaced with models like Simulation Theory, The Matrix, and Many Worlds Theory, developed by physicist Hugh Everett III while he was a student at Princeton. Everett went over the Copenhagen Interpretation with a finer-toothed comb and decided that the collapse of the wave function was a myth. It wasn’t that the particle decided to go through slot A and therefore all other possibilities were eliminated. According to Everett, the particle going through slot A only happens in one universe (or dimension), and it going instead through slot B, C, D, E, F, etc. happens in other dimensions that are so close to the one we live in that we can’t see them.

Not only that, but you yourself exist in all these dimensions too, and each one of those versions of you makes slightly different choices that can butterfly into full-fledged tornados if the wind blows through slot E instead of slot F.

And if it blows through slot E flat, then we’re almost back to where we started, in the enharmonic of an existential crisis.

Woe R us?

All this is just to say that at times it does seem a bit irrelevant to write about, oh, say, music theory, or jazz, or Samurai flute players, or the island of Svalbard, on Substack or anywhere else. But we do it anyway.

At the end of the day (which may come sooner than we think) the only thing that gets one through the existential crisis du jour is one’s personal quest. But let’s say that half the world ends and you’re left in the other half. You would likely be in a survival scenario, which wouldn’t leave much time or energy for personal quests like becoming a great saxophonist or discovering the meaning of life.

No. You’d be foraging for food and clean water, trying to stay warm, caring for sick or injured loved ones, hiding from predators, plotting escape routes, sewing gold coins in the lining of your coat....you know, the usual.

Einstein is reputed to have replied to the question “what weapons will be used in World War III?” with “I don’t know, but I know what weapons will be used in World War IV: sticks and stones.” Whether this thought was originally uttered by Einstein or an unnamed army Lieutenant matters not, nor does it matter whether the weapons mentioned were sticks and stones or bows and arrows. That answer lies somewhere in slots B through F.

In Colossus of Maroussi, Henry Miller shares this advice: “To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself.”

Nevertheless, if one is not reading the news or listening to gossip (or are they the same thing?) one must replace those activities with something else. I suggest the following:

Learn ukulele… Chess… Tarot reading… Spanish… Astrology… Knitting… Painting… Etc.

Or maybe get into something even more applicable to doomsday scenarios: Permaculture, for instance. Hydroponic gardening or fishing. First Aid.

We’ll go more into this shortly, but first let’s remember the overarching theme of the present era: Pluto has returned to the sign of Aquarius, and his ass will be sitting there solidly until 2043. Maybe that doesn’t mean anything to you, but consider that the last time Pluto made himself at home in Aquarius we had the American and French Revolutions, and the launch of the Industrial Revolution. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

We can’t help but notice the ubiquitous “disclosures” of all sorts that have been surfacing. From the Underworld. These disclosures, in addition to all the other tensions we’re experiencing, are typical of Mr. Pluto, and to a certain extent they represent our collective Shadow coming to light. So it’s not so much about blaming “The Other” as it is about us facing what we’ve been trying to repress.

Pass the pipe, please.

This is not going to get any easier, friends. So it’s incumbent upon us to develop and initiate plans of action that are meaningful to us. Otherwise we become fodder for the Technocracy.

I’d like to issue a call for each of us to own our nervous system. We can’t continually be in fight-or-flight mode! Training practices that can be useful here are:

• Meditation (I recommend the Holosync program, which uses binaural beats to guide your brainwaves into coherence.)

• Yoga or Martial Arts (You can study qigong, tai chi and other arts online, there are some really good programs out there. See the appendix for some recommendations.)

• Breathwork training

• Journaling

• Chanting, singing sacred music

The importance of having a connection to community can’t be stressed enough.

• Volunteering

• Hosting small salons, reading or discussion groups

• Cooperative food storage/mutual aid logistics

• Ham radio operation

I’m remembering back to 9-11 in New York City. I had signed up for a miniature bookmaking workshop at the Center For Book Arts that started just a few days later. It was led by a woman book artist, and as it happened, all the participants (there were seven or eight of us) were women. We all sat around a big art table making miniature books for four days. It was very calming. During that emotionally wrenching aftermath of 9-11, it seemed like a reminder of times hundreds of years past, when women gathered around the hearth to do mending and quilting together.

Other activities that can be done both alone and with a group:

• Woodworking

• Pottery

• Knife sharpening/tool maintenance

• Bicycle repair

• Sourdough baking/fermentation science

• Seed saving

• Rainwater harvesting

• Native plant identification

None of this is because societal collapse is inevitable, because it’s not. Timelines can change. But competence reduces anxiety!

More ideas:

• Writing a family history (yours or someone else’s)

• Archiving oral stories

• Translating a text that has meaning for you

• Writing a book

If one has no purpose, one can easily be overcome by fear. With purpose, we enable ourselves to go forward. Our quest must outlast the news cycle!

There’s no denial of crisis, just a refusal to live in permanent crisis mode. We pursue mastery, beauty, and competence without guilt or apology. Also, we can freely reject two of the most horrible agenda points that the new world technocratic order is trying to push on us–

1. Say no to isolation. Connect with people.

2. Say no to digital surveillance and use cash whenever possible. Whenever we use cash, we assert our freedom from the technocratic corral.

Please share your thoughts in the comments so that the hundreds of Temple of Artists readers can benefit from our collective wisdom.