It Could Be Worse

We live in difficult times. You feel it in the news cycle, in conversations with friends, even in the checkout line at the grocery store. The global fabric seems frayed: rising authoritarianism threatens democracies near and far. Tariffs destabilize markets. Inflation pinches wallets. And tensions in the Middle East raise the chilling specter of yet another devastating war.

And yet… it could be worse.

I had that thought—unironically—as I was hiking Park City Mountain this week. There, perched along the trail, was a volcanic basalt boulder. Not just any rock, but a time traveler from the Tertiary Period, roughly 40 million years ago. It had ridden a wave of molten fury from the earth’s crust in an eruption that once transformed the land we now ski, hike, and bike upon. It was a reminder that while human conflict and economic angst feel overwhelming, we are lucky to be living in the eye of Earth’s geological storm.

Consider Yellowstone—now a serene wonderland of geysers and elk—yet it harbors a supervolcano that exploded catastrophically during the same epoch. Its granitic fury could, if awakened again, obliterate the continent as we know it, sending Homo sapiens the way of the trilobite. It’s not hyperbole; it’s just Earth being Earth.

Add to that the glaciations that have repeatedly frozen much of the planet and the orogenic (mountain-building) periods that reshaped entire continents. And somehow, between ice sheets and magma floods, we humans managed to rise, build cities, write symphonies, and invent espresso machines. We’re living in a surprisingly stable window between cataclysms.

So I stood there next to that black basalt relic and whispered a small, slightly ironic prayer: Kiss the ground.

Because despite man’s inhumanity to man—despite corruption, division, and our perilous flirtation with extinction—we’re still here. And we still have choices. To treat each other better. To protect what’s left. To prepare wisely. To hold fast to the fragile but precious peace between geological and geopolitical upheavals.

We owe it to those who come next. And to those rocks that remind us:

It really could be worse.