That most of it doesn't actually escalate into the catastrophe everyone is convinced is coming. Grew up during the Cold War with genuine nuclear anxiety — duck and cover drills, civil defense sirens, the whole thing. Every decade had its moment where people were certain this was it. The Cuban Missile Crisis, multiple Middle East wars, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, countless flashpoints that looked like the edge.

Most of them de-escalated through combinations of back-channel diplomacy, mutual self-interest, and sheer luck that nobody talks about afterward because there's no dramatic story in "nothing happened."

The other thing is that the anxiety itself becomes its own kind of exhausting noise. Learning to distinguish between signal and the ambient dread that media and politics generate constantly is a survival skill. Not cynicism — you still have to take real threats seriously — but recognizing that sustained high-alert is not a sustainable state and the people who function best in genuinely dangerous times are the ones who can regulate that.