How to be a still point in a turning world

When things stop making sense, people look to lawyers for explanations and guidance. But what happens when we have no good answers to give them? A short guide for lawyers trying to navigate the storm.

Taking questions after delivering a presentation to a law firm conference last week, I was asked something short and sensible about the state of the world — I can’t remember the original query, because I launched into one of my patented “five-minute answers to ten-second questions” that wandered across several semi-related topics. But I ended up by making a point that stuck with me afterwards, and that I thought I’d share with you in a brief note today.

Humans are an incredibly adaptable species. We can grow accustomed to just about any change in our environment, for better and definitely for worse. We now experience “once-a-century” floods and wildfires every couple of years, and we’ve quietly adjusted to that. “Okay, new normal: Bible-scale natural disasters roughly once every Olympics or so. Got it.” The myth of the frog in slowly boiling water expresses the idea fairly well. (It is a myth, by the way: Frogs do jump out of water when it gets too hot.)

These last few months have really put this capacity to the test, however. These have been Lenin’s famous “weeks when decades happen” — and not just in the United States, where, to take just one example, the government now kidnaps people off the street and sends them to offshore prison camps for their political beliefs and dares the courts to stop it. Around the world, tariffs imposed by the Trump administration are going to make $1.65 trillion worth of goods more expensive, slashing growth forecasts and threatening recessions everywhere — unless the tariffs are paused, or rescinded, or excluded, or Venus enters the 9th House for Leo Ascendant, or whatever comes next.

Pundits like to describe this as a period of “volatility,” and I suppose that’s true enough. But what that description doesn’t cover is the sheer irrationality of everything that’s happening, and the capriciousness, and the seemingly pointless cruelty. What the hell could possibly be the goal here? It’s so hard to make sense of it all — and because of that, it’s equally hard to assess where it’s all going to lead, how long it’s going to take to get there, and what horrors might await us when we arrive.

This is, to say the absolute least, a stressful experience. But if there’s one professional class that’s going to be especially vulnerable to the stress all this madness is causing, it’s lawyers. Partly, this is because our entire worldview is premised on rationality. The ultimate legal standard is “reasonableness” and our most powerful tool is evidence — so when these both get thrown out the window, we’re left feeling not just astonished, but rebuked, as the foundations of our worldview are contemptuously cast aside.

But I think it’s also especially hard on lawyers because we’re the ones who are supposed to make sense of it all. Other people come to us — not just our clients, but also family members and even casual acquaintances — looking for clarity, reassurance, and direction. “What is going on out there? Why is this happening? How will this affect my business/family/life? What will happen next? What should I do?”

And we’re supposed to have the answers. Lawyers are meant to be the personification of informed professional composure. For the people who know us and the society that needs us (more than it thinks), we are the still point in a turning world. So when that world starts spinning off its axis, more and more people will turn our way and look to us for answers and assurance.

And if we don’t have good answers and reliable assurance to provide, we can become very, very stressed. Because if we can’t do that, then what’s the point of us?

We’re already a deeply unwell profession, and a massive crisis of confidence and identity among lawyers is the last thing anyone needs. So if any of the foregoing resonates with you or a lawyer you know, I want to offer a couple of thoughts to contemplate as a tonic, and maybe even an antidote, to the professional toxicity of our current moment.

The first thing to understand and acknowledge, when looking to make sense out of the chaos, is that this situation doesn’t have to make sense, and many aspects of it aren’t going to. Don’t look for an all-encompassing rational explanation, because there isn’t one. If you like, chalk all this up to one or more of the following:

• Some extremely important global decisions are being made by a small number of deeply irrational, nihilistic, and malevolent actors.

• Some utterly baffling phenomena will only be understandable and explicable later, using models and data we haven’t developed yet.

• Some aspects of what we’re experiencing very literally have never occurred before, and we have absolutely no precedent to help guide us.

The fact is, we’ve hit the outer limits of what we can satisfactorily explain about the state of our world. We’re all under the rule of a mad king. Nobody, myself very much included, knows what’s really going on or what will happen next. This isn’t a square peg we’re trying to fit into a round hole; it’s a continuously-morphing tetra-hexagonal cube that frequently twists out of our grip.

But we don’t need to understand everything about an oncoming storm in order to survive it. We just need to know how to survive. And that brings me to my second point: Your top priority is to get through all of this — you personally, reading this right now — with your spirit and values intact.

You’re a lawyer. You provide helpful and sometimes essential services to a wide range of people and organizations that rely on you, and you do it according to a canon of ethics and duties. You also, hopefully, have a sense of professional identity and purpose that serves as the foundation of your work and a strength of character that animates it.

But you’re also human. You are, in fact, first and foremost human, and while that means you possess extraordinary gifts, it also means you operate under fundamental limitations. Put more plainly: You can only do so much and be so much.

You don’t need to be perfect, because you’re not. You don’t need to have all the answers in this moment of madness, because nobody does — we don’t even know half the questions yet. You don’t need to be an infallible oracle to the people who come to you looking for help, and you have no business beating yourself up when the best you can tell them is, “I don’t know, either.”

What you can give them is your time and attention, your patience and your sympathy, your most well-informed suggestions and your best general advice under these ridiculous circumstances. And you can show them an example of someone whose professional life is grounded in foundational values like the rule of law, the protection of universal human rights, and genuine concern for other people’s welfare. It’s not your intellectual brilliance or your analytical genius people need right now. It’s your humanity.

We are all experiencing enormous amounts of stress at this moment. And I’m sorry to say that the stress is very likely going to get worse and its proximate causes are very likely going to last longer than we think or hope. There’s a great deal of hard work that needs to be done to turn all this around.

Your job, right now, as a lawyer, is to take care of yourself and your loved ones first; to maintain your professional values and personal integrity second; and to offer other people all the support and guidance that’s reasonably possible for you to give. And then, with whatever you’ve got left over, fight for justice and human dignity and the rule of law, because that fight cannot be won without lawyers.

The storm is here, and the night will be long. But if we stay true to our values and our oaths and each other, then the storm will end and daylight will come again. So don’t ask more of yourself than you can give. Just give what you can — I promise that will be more than enough.