How to Find Peace in Today’s World

The alarm goes off in a comfortable house. The bed is good, the room is quiet, nobody is sick, and the roof does not leak. Before either foot touches the floor, a hand finds the phone. In the time it takes the coffee maker to warm up, that hand has scrolled through a war, a flood, two things a politician said, a story about the price of eggs, a reminder that the car payment is due, a message from a sister who is upset about something that happened at the last family dinner, and a photograph of a former coworker standing on a beach somewhere that looks a lot nicer than this bedroom. The person has not stood up yet. They are already tired. They have not said a word to anybody and they already feel behind, and the feeling that follows them into the shower and out to the car has a name they would never use for it. The name is dread.

If that is you, I want you to notice something about that morning. Nothing in the house was wrong. The trouble arrived through a piece of glass the size of your palm, and it arrived before you had a chance to decide whether you wanted it. That is the condition most of us live in now, and it is new. Our grandparents had plenty of trouble, but it came in the mail or on the evening news, at a set hour, and then it stopped. Ours never stops. It is the first thing we touch and the last thing we put down, and in between it keeps a running tally of everything we should be worried about, comparing ourselves to, and angry at.

So before we talk about faith, or therapy, or what would make you happy, we have to talk about noise. Because the first reason so many people cannot find peace is not that they have the wrong beliefs or the wrong habits. It is that they have never been quiet long enough to hear what is actually bothering them.

THE FIVE THINGS THAT WEAR A PERSON DOWN

The first is information. There is more of it coming at you in one morning than a person in my grandmother's generation saw in a month, and almost all of it is built to produce a reaction, because a reaction is what keeps you looking. A headline that makes you afraid, a clip that makes you furious, a story that makes you certain the world is ending, these are not accidents of the day's news. They are the product. You are not a bad or weak person for feeling worn out by them. You are a person responding exactly the way the thing was designed to make you respond.

The second is money, or more exactly the uncertainty around it. Prices move, jobs change, retirement accounts go up and down in ways nobody can explain to you, and a person can have a paid-off house and a pension and still lie awake doing arithmetic. Fear of the future does not require that the future be bad. It only requires that you cannot see it.

The third is comparison. A generation ago you compared your life to your neighbors, your cousins, and the people at church, and most of them were doing about as well as you were. Now you compare it to a curated feed of strangers at their best moments, edited, lit, and chosen, and you do it before breakfast. Nobody posts the argument in the car on the way to the beach. You are measuring the inside of your life against the outside of everyone else's, and the inside always loses.

The fourth is the tension in the air. I am not going to tell you who is right about anything political in this book, and I would ask you to notice how rare that sentence has become. Whatever side you stand on, you have probably lost a friend or gone quiet at a holiday table over it, and the constant low-grade anger of a divided country gets into a person the way humidity does. You do not have to pick a side to feel it. You only have to live here.

The fifth is the hardest one to see, because it does not look like a problem. It is the gap between external comfort and internal peace. You have the house. You have the car. You have the family photographs on the wall. By every measure you were given growing up, you made it. And the quiet, private feeling that something is still missing is made worse by the fact that you have no right to it. Who are you to be unhappy, with all of this? So you do not say it out loud. You just carry it, which is heavier than saying it.

The National Institute of Mental Health reports that in 2022, 23.1 percent of adults in this country were living with some form of mental illness, and that only 50.6 percent of those adults received any treatment for it in the past year. I put those two figures here, early, for one reason. If you are struggling, you are not unusual, and if you have never told anyone, you are not unusual either. About half the people in that first number are carrying it the same way you are.

WHAT PEACE IS NOT

Most of the advice you have been given about peace was advice about getting rid of the noise. Turn off the news. Delete the app. Move to the country. Retire early. Some of that is good advice, and we will come to boundaries later in the book. But I have known people who turned off everything and moved to a lake and were as restless on the dock as they had been at the office, and I have known people in the middle of a loud and difficult life who were steady as a post. The noise is real, and it matters, but the noise is not the whole story. Peace is not the absence of trouble. If it were, nobody would ever have had any.

Peace is also not a mood. A good mood is a gift and I will take one any day I can get one, but it leaves when the weather changes. The capacity I am describing in this book, to stay grounded when life becomes difficult and respond like yourself instead of like a cornered animal, is closer to a skill than a mood, and skills can be learned at any age. The traditions we will walk through in Part Two spent thousands of years teaching it. The clinicians we will meet in Part Three spent the last century studying it. Neither of them promised that the trouble would stop. Both of them promised you could stand up in it.

And peace is not something you find by looking harder for it. That is the trap in the title of this chapter. Everybody wants it and nobody knows where it is, and the reason nobody knows is that it is not somewhere. It is not at the lake, or at retirement, or on the other side of the promotion. It is built, slowly, out of what you believe, what you understand about yourself, and what you do with an ordinary day. That is the work of the rest of this book. This chapter has a smaller job, which is to get you to look at what is actually disturbing you, because you cannot address what you refuse to identify.

THE THREE LISTS

Here is the first technique in the book, and it is the one everything else rests on. I call it The Three Lists. Sit down with a sheet of paper, not a screen, and write down everything that is disturbing your peace right now. Do not edit it. Do not decide whether something is important enough or whether you have a right to be bothered by it. The car payment goes on the list next to the war. Your sister goes on the list next to the price of eggs. If it crossed your mind this morning and left a mark, it goes on the list. Most people find that it takes about a page and that they feel a little foolish and a little lighter by the bottom of it.

Now draw three columns and sort the page into them. The first column is what you can control. Not what you wish you could control, what you actually can: your spending this month, whether you call your sister, whether the phone is in the bedroom tonight. The second column is what you can influence. You cannot control how a conversation with your grown son goes, but you can influence it by how you start it. You cannot control your health, but you can influence it. The third column is what is outside your control entirely. The election. The price of eggs. What a former coworker does with her vacation. Whether it rains on Saturday.

What people discover when they do this is that the third column is long, and that it has been getting most of their attention. We spend our worry on the things we cannot touch because worrying feels like doing something, and we neglect the first column because the things in it are small and unglamorous and would require us to actually do them. The Three Lists do not make the third column disappear. They show you where your peace has been leaking, and they give you a place to start that is actually in your hands. There is an old prayer, used in church basements and recovery rooms for most of a century, that asks for the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can, and the wisdom to know the difference. You do not have to believe in anyone to see that the wisdom is the hard part. The Three Lists are the wisdom, done on paper.

WHERE THIS CHAPTER STOPS

I want to be careful here about what this exercise is and is not. Sorting your worries into columns will quiet a mind that is simply overloaded, and for a lot of people that is most of the problem. It will not treat a mind that is unwell. If you did the lists and found that the dread did not move, that it has been with you most mornings for weeks, that you have lost interest in the things you used to enjoy, or that the thoughts in the third column have turned dark, that is not a sorting problem. That is a reason to talk to your doctor or a licensed therapist, and Part Three of this book is about how to do that without shame. If the thoughts have turned toward not wanting to be here, you can call or text 988 right now, at any hour, and a person will answer. The lists can wait. That cannot.

For everyone else, the morning I described at the start of this chapter is still going to happen tomorrow. The phone will still be on the nightstand. The news will still be bad. What can be different is that you will know, by name, what is actually bothering you, and you will know which column it lives in. That is not peace yet. It is the ground you build it on.

LET’S TALK ABOUT IT

Let me say what most people say when they finally admit this out loud. I have no right to feel this way. Look at my life. And then the next sentence is usually, but I do, and I am tired of pretending I do not. Both of those sentences are true at once, and that is the whole problem in two lines. You are allowed to be grateful for your life and worn down by it in the same breath. Nobody is grading you on that. The person who says it out loud is further along than the person who keeps it under the blanket, and if you have read this far, you have already said it.

THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH

Most of what disturbed your peace this morning, you invited in. Not the war and not the prices, but the hour you spent looking at them before you had said good morning to anyone in your own house. The world did not do that to you. The phone was on the nightstand because you put it there. That is uncomfortable, and it is also the best news in this chapter, because a thing you did is a thing you can do differently.

FAITH AND REFLECTION

If you pray, pray tonight for the wisdom to tell the difference between the trouble that is yours to carry and the trouble that is not, and for the honesty to look at your own page without flinching. If you do not pray, sit for two minutes before bed with the phone in another room and ask yourself one question: of everything I worried about today, how much of it was mine? Either way, do not try to answer it yet. Let the question sit overnight.

UNDERSTANDING YOURSELF

Do The Three Lists on paper before the end of today. Write down everything disturbing your peace, without editing, then sort every item into one of three columns: what you can control, what you can influence, and what is outside your control. When you are finished, circle the longest column and write one sentence under it about how much of your attention it has been getting. Keep the page. You will use it again in the 30-Day Peace Plan.

DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT

For the next seven mornings, the phone does not come into the bedroom. Charge it in the kitchen. Buy a ten-dollar alarm clock if you need one. Do not read anything on a screen until you have been awake for thirty minutes and have spoken to a living person or stepped outside. That is the one action for this week, and it is the smallest, most controllable item on anybody's first column.

THE PEACE CHECK

When I woke up this morning, what was the first thing I let into my mind, and did I choose it? Of the things on my page, how many are in the column I can actually do something about? Is there one person in my life I could show that page to without being embarrassed, and if so, why have I not?