When the World Changes Under Your Feet
Jobs, institutions and whole countries can flip fast; when it happens to you, here is what to hold and what to drop.
On a Thursday evening in November 1989, an official in East Berlin read out a new rule for travel at a press conference. A reporter asked when it started. Right away, he said. That was a mistake, but it went out live. Before midnight, a guard facing a huge crowd opened the gate in a wall that had stood for twenty-eight years. Less than a year later, the country on the east side of that wall was gone. Its money and its rules went with it, and over the next few years, a great many of its jobs did too.
Picture going to work that Thursday. You knew which rules mattered and what your job would look like in ten years. Within a year, a lot of what you knew no longer held. Some people were overjoyed. Some lost work they had planned their whole lives around.
You may never see a wall come down. But you will live through smaller versions. The company you work for gets sold. The field you trained for shrinks. A rule everyone followed changes overnight. A town you love stops being the town you knew. Big things that looked solid can flip fast. When they do, three rules help.
First, rule four. Some forks are bigger than you. Big systems tend to look steady right up until they flip, and then the flip seems to come from nowhere. My teacher Dr. Bob liked to use the Berlin Wall as his picture of how fast that can happen. You didn’t choose this fork, and you can’t push it back. But there are always small pushes still in your hands, and now is where they live. On days when the ground moves, I say four letters to myself: EWOP. Everything Is Working Out Perfectly. You know by now that I won’t argue for it.
Second, rule two. Your map is now old. It was drawn for a world that just moved, and that isn’t your fault. Some of it is still good and some of it is now wrong, and you can’t tell which by thinking about it. Go touch the new world. Talk to people who have already landed on the other side, and ask what works for them now, not what used to. Drop the details of the old map. Keep what your hands and your head know how to do. A skill is the part of the map that travels with you.
Third, rule one. Keep things moving through you. When the ground shakes, the pull is to close up, stay in and wait for it to stop. That’s when the flow matters most. Hold on to people above all. Call them. Eat with them. Let them help. Keep sleeping, eating and moving even when it feels pointless. Those hold you up while the rest sorts itself out.
If you’re young when the ground moves, it can feel like there’s nothing under you at all. You wouldn’t be alone in that. In a big American survey in 2025, about one in three high school students said they’d had two weeks or more of feeling sad or hopeless nearly every day. It was bad enough that they stopped doing some of their usual things. If you’ve felt that, you are not strange, and you have a great deal of company. And if the ground feels gone for a long time, talk to someone. A friend first, and then someone whose job it is, like a doctor or a counselor. That’s not weakness. It’s grabbing the rail when the floor moves.
Try this this week.
Take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle. On the left, write what still holds: the people who pick up when you call, what you know how to do, the small things you do every day. On the right, write what’s gone or going. Don’t argue with either side. Then pick one thing from the left and feed it every day for a week. Call the person. Use the skill. Keep the morning walk. At the end of the week, look again at how long the left side is.
One line to remember
When the ground moves, hold on to people and let go of the old map.
