Breaking the Intellectual Doom Loop: How to Write While the World Burns (and Your Brain Spirals)

Featuring Anxiety, a Doom-Containment Protocol, and a Heroic Effort to Work Offline

A few years into my academic career, a senior scholar looked at me across a sea of half-drunk conference coffees and said, with the calm detachment of someone commenting on mild weather: “You’re only ever as good as your last paper.” Charming, right?

I smiled, nodded, even managed a polite joke, because what else do you do when someone reduces your entire intellectual worth to a single PDF? Meanwhile, my inner monologue was doing backflips: “THAT’S A HORRIBLE THING TO SAY TO ANOTHER HUMAN.”

And yet, the comment stuck. It lodged itself somewhere inconvenient, wedged right between my prefrontal cortex and my sense of self-worth. Cozying up next to the ever-present fear that I’ve replied-all to something that absolutely did not require a reply-all. Like a department-wide email about a missing coffee cup. Or worse, a throwaway comment that was deeply, emphatically, meant for internal consumption.

Looking back on it, this particular nugget of academic nihilism hit me harder than I’d like to admit. Partly because, let’s be honest, like so many early-career academics, I already had a baseline level of anxiety. Not full-blown disaster mode, but far from Zen monk energy. And academia, with its intricate rejection rituals, cryptic power dynamics, and relentless “are you doing enough?” subtext, is not exactly a wellness retreat.

The Intellectual Doom Loop

Fast forward a decade or so: I’m no longer junior. I have responsibilities. I supervise PhD students, serve on hiring committees, referee papers I barely have time to read, and, on paper, at least, lead things. But the anxiety? Still very much there. Still lurking in the quiet moment before hitting “submit.” Still rising in the brutal 60 seconds after opening a decision letter. Still whispering in the background after three consecutive weeks of “not being productive”.

What changed wasn’t the workload, but the background noise. Mid-career, my internal monologue collided with external reality: geopolitical upheaval, climate catastrophes, and the ambient, all-consuming roar of social media. And I began to notice something unsettling, my ability to write, to think with depth and originality, was eroding. Not because I stopped caring.

Because I cared too much. About the state of the world. About my students, many of whom carry this same heavy awareness in their bones. About the terrifying sense that nothing we do, no article, no policy brief, no meticulously edited paragraph, is enough. And that’s when I found myself stuck in what I now call:

The Intellectual Doom Loop: Care deeply → Feel overwhelmed → Doom-scroll → Feel worse → Cannot write → Feel guilty → Repeat.

This piece is about the ways in which I tried and am still trying to get out it, and how I found my writing mojo back. I write it in the hope that it helps others.

When Care Becomes Crippling

Academia is no stranger to anxiety. It hums beneath every funding application, every syllabus rewrite, every hallway “How’s the writing going?” But the past few years have amplified it beyond the personal.

The war in Ukraine. The destruction in Gaza. The swelling tides of authoritarianism. The daily drumbeat of climate collapse. These aren't abstractions, they are front-page realities. And if you’re someone who teaches students, engages in public debate, or simply reads the news before breakfast, you may find that the usual strategies, in my case yoga, journaling, strategic caffeine use, no longer suffice. For me, the turning point came not with a dramatic event, but with a slow, subtle decline: the mental erosion brought on by scrolling.

Down and down I went, through headlines, hot takes, hashtags. Each swipe a tiny jolt of despair, a microdose of helplessness. The result? Doom. Not in the metaphysical sense. Just the day-to-day, soul-sapping kind that leaves you staring at a blinking cursor, wondering what words are even for anymore.

And when my students started coming to office hours echoing the same questions, “What’s the point?” “Does any of this matter?”, I felt something else: responsibility. Others were personally affected by war, democratic erosion and climate disasters. This affected me. Because here’s the thing: writing, for those of us in the business of ideas, is not just a career. It’s a form of care. It’s how we show up in and for the world. It is how we show up for our students, for the future. And when the world feels like it’s burning, that care starts to hurt.

Enter the Intellectual Doom Loop

The Intellectual Doom Loop is what I call the feedback cycle between caring deeply and spiraling mentally. It works something like this:

You read the news.

You feel terrible.

You decide to read more news, to stay “informed.”

You feel even worse.

You can no longer concentrate, much less write something coherent.

And start all over again.

It’s paralyzing. And for those of us who feel an ethical obligation to the public, who believe that thinking and writing are acts of engagement, the loop feels like betrayal. The world needs analysis, clarity, voice. But all you have is a browser history full of horrors and a doc titled “Final_final_TRY3_ACTUALLYFINAL.docx” with no words inside.

So what to do? There are only two real options: change careers, or find a strategy to keep going. I chose the second. Edward Said is one of my intellectual heros, and he once wrote: “The intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public... whose raison d'être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug.”

His words stayed with me. Not just as a moral imperative, but as a reminder: our ability to speak, to represent, to write, especially in times of turmoil, is not optional. It’s kinda the point. That’s when I decided some years ago to develop something I call my doom-containment protocol.

My Doom-Containment Protocol

Here’s how I write in an age of cascading crises. None of this is revolutionary. But it’s the scaffolding I cling to when the emotional winds pick up. I am writing this down in the hope this inspires you to develop your own strategies.

So here we go:

1. One Rant Per Week: I allow myself one apocalyptic outburst per week. A proper rant. Doom, despair, performative sarcasm. I vent. I purge. And then, I stop. It doesn’t fix the world. But it clears the air.

2. Limit the Scroll: No, I don’t need to read five threads about the collapse of Western liberalism before my first coffee. I check the news twice a day. I avoid the comments. I remind myself that being “informed” is not the same as being overwhelmed.

3. Interrogate the Doom: When anxiety surges, I pause and ask: “How does this help me?” If the answer is “it doesn’t,” I redirect. I’ve learned that chronic despair is not a moral position. It’s just a block. It keeps me from doing the work that might help.

4. Channel Care Into Craft: If I’m going to be concerned about the world (and I am), I might as well use it. I decided to engage in more public-facing scholarship. I contribute to debates. I use my research to inform op-eds and policy briefs. Care becomes action. And action, however modest, interrupts paralysis.

5. Protect the Writing Zone: I treat writing like a fragile ecosystem. It needs time, quiet, and space. When I’m writing, I write. No tabs open. No news. Just words. Sentences. Paragraphs. Thoughts. The world can wait for a couple of hours.

Final Thought

There’s a reason this blog is called Respect the Marble. It’s about treating the fragile, chaotic, beautiful material of our ideas, and ourselves, with care. Anxiety is real. Doom is real. But so is the work. So is the deep thinking. So is the possibility of change. And when it all gets too much, take a breath. Drink some water. Write a sentence. That’s how we start.

Let’s Stay in Touch

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