T hink about your average day. You wake up, you check the weather , you know how to get dressed, without touching grass. You go to the supermarket; you buy out-of-season goods that were flown over in a day from warmer climates. At our thumbs, our phones make us God : omnipresent, all-powerful, in charge of what we want, what we like, what happens next. All this goes to say, as the world faces increasing uncertainty – power blackouts , food shortages, flooding or wildfires – we are totally unprepared to cope.

“Even the merest uncertainty, like not getting our morning coffee the way that we like it, can send us into a psychological tailspin,” says Dr Anna Lembke, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University and author of the 2021 bestseller Dopamine Nation and the new Radical Surrender: Letting Go in a World Addicted to Control . “We experience a profound narcissistic injury when we don’t get our own way,” she adds.…