Staying on Track When Bad Things Happen in the World
How to maintain motivation if you feel you are not doing enough for the world.
Updated February 8, 2026 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Let us ponder three important truths:
If we compile these three facts, what we get is a group of people who are, by their nature, active and ambitious, who are concerned about the world, and who may feel that their role as students is preventing them from influencing it. Of course, many graduate students do not feel that way, but if you do, this can cause a lot of suffering, dissipation of momentum, and doubt in the form: “How can I keep exploring obscure phenomena when real people are suffering in real time?”
Here is an alternative way of thinking about your time in grad school and your responsibility toward the world.
Many people mistakenly think that when bad things happen, the right questions to ask are whether you care about the people being affected and whether there is something that can be done. If the answer to both questions is “yes,” then many people arrive at the conclusion that they are remiss if they are not doing anything. However, there is a third question that people forget to ask, but it is no less important. That question is: “Do I possess a special skill, knowledge, or capabilities that make me the right person to be doing that thing right now?”
If the answer to this third question is also “yes,” then it makes sense to consider taking a break from your Ph.D. to apply your special skill to the situation. For example, I knew a person who was trained as an EMT, and at the height of the COVID pandemic, he took a break from his studies to volunteer as a first responder in his local community. The thing to note about this person is that he both possessed a specific and valuable skill that fit the plight of the moment and that he had a very specific and practical idea about how to deploy that skill. This represents a minority of cases. It is much more common to hear sentiments like this:
“I can’t focus on my research because I keep thinking that it is pointless to spend all this time doing something esoteric that helps no one when I should be doing something to help humanity.”
“Why do I deserve the privilege of being in grad school when other people are not so lucky?”
“Every time I sit down to write, I start thinking about how selfish I was to pick a topic of study that solves no issues in the world and doesn’t benefit anyone but me.”
What we may notice about these statements is that they are really self-flagellating (“I am a bad person”) and very non-specific (“helping humanity” is not an executable plan). These kinds of sentiments are unlikely to lead to actual actions, because no actions are implied in them. The only thing they are guaranteed to do is slow you down, make you miss deadlines, and make you feel depressed . Therefore, if you find yourself plagued by amorphous shame and regret, consider the following points.
a. If you are seeing a tragedy unfolding in the world but do not have a specific idea about what role you might be able to play in offsetting it, consider the possibility that now is not your time. But your time may be coming soon. Your goal is not to shame yourself and burn your energy on fruitless self-flagellation, but to generate and conserve energy so that you are able to use it later. Do not allow yourself to reach the point when you actually could be useful with an empty tank of energy and resources.
b. No one benefits from your suffering. Perhaps it is true that you are privileged and that being a grad student is a luxury that many people do not have, but denying yourself privileges is not in itself a useful action—no one will profit by it. On the contrary, if people like you, who are conscious of privilege and fairness, give up their strategic positions, there will be no one left to help pull up those coming up from behind.
c. If you are concerned that your chosen field of study is “useless” because it is too abstract, esoteric, or otherwise removed from reality, consider this: Times of unrest and upheaval always tend to propel some particular, usually very applied, discipline far above the rest. For example, during the COVID pandemic, we desperately needed biomedical researchers—we relied on them for drugs and vaccines and were admittedly less concerned with discovering new planets or refining our understanding of history. But the pandemic receded, and we found ourselves back where we started—living in a world where societies struggle to be healthy if there aren’t people in them tasked with looking at the stars, developing abstract mathematical ideas, remembering and immortalizing the lessons learned from history, and preserving and transmitting through the generations the shared humanity contained in poetry and literature.
If you are studying literature, poetry, theoretical physics, or mathematics, we need you. You may not feel that you are doing something immediately helpful to society, but there are few historical examples of societies that did not value abstract learning and were able to thrive over time.
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Anna Braverman, Psy.D., is a clinical psychologist based in Princeton, NJ.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.