Is the world crazy ?

Anyone who has lived long enough probably won’t remember a time when people weren’t saying the world had gone mad. Crises—of all kinds—come and go like waves in the ocean: sometimes calm, sometimes turbulent. We stay tuned in to the news and its constant (and well-commercialized) stream of events, statements, and speculations, which we often link to our own lives, even though they rarely affect us directly. Just a brief disconnection is enough to realize that, despite its ups and downs, life flows more peacefully than we usually perceive.

This world, so easily labeled as “crazy,” is far from perfect. Yet life within it unfolds in a way that may not be as good as we wish—nor as bad as we fear. When we focus on this tension, we realize we've replaced the necessary, momentary stress of real situations with a constant, toxic stress over potentially adverse ones. Addicted to the dark adrenaline of uncertainty, we stop living in the present and pile constant suffering onto life’s inevitable pains.

Buddhism often teaches that beneath the surface of a storm, the depths remain calm—and that we can always find refuge there through meditation. We can also observe how nature, untouched by human noise, continues on its path undisturbed by our troubles. Reconnecting with that life brings us back down to earth. As I wrote in my book, meditation became necessary the moment human beings saw a peaceful landscape—and realized it was their own minds making all the noise.

The madness of the world is a fact. It can strike us hard when it hits close—but it doesn’t have to make us suffer all the time. From the simple relief of a deep breath to the quiet of contemplating nature, we can always reconnect with the serenity and clarity of what works without our mental interference. The hardest part is to stop, lift our head, observe what’s disturbing us… and then let it go.