By James Banakis

November 4^th, 2026

I’ve never found much joy in doing dangerous things. Some people climb mountains, jump out of airplanes, or swim with sharks. I’ve always figured life is treacherous enough without going out of my way to encourage it.

I avoid haunted houses, amusement park rides, and anything requiring a signed liability waiver. I prefer sitting near an exit door. In school, I discovered that sitting somewhere in the middle of the classroom reduced the odds of being called upon. Even today, I avoid casino gambling because I’ve never understood the attraction of voluntarily handing over money to someone who already has more than I do.

I’m not particularly paranoid. I simply believe in giving danger a respectable amount of distance.

As a Baby Boomer, however, I’ve spent most of my life being told by experts that the world is coming to an end. Not eventually, mind you. Soon. Very soon. Preferably before the next election.

Many of us remember lining up for polio vaccinations in 1955, accompanied by anxious parents who understood that the disease was a genuine threat. We also remember crouching beneath our school desks or sticking our heads into lockers during atomic bomb drills. Apparently, a few inches of plywood or a metal locker was expected to protect us from a Soviet nuclear attack.

I never questioned the wisdom of this at the time. After all, these were adults, and adults supposedly knew what they were doing.

By high school, the warnings had become more creative.

Paul Ehrlich’s bestselling book The Population Bomb warned of catastrophic overpopulation and food shortages. I remember one of my teachers, a gentleman appropriately named Mr. Means, holding up an enormous raw T-bone steak in front of the class.

“Take a good look at this,” he warned. “In five years, you won’t be seeing one of these anymore.”

The entire class groaned. There were practically no vegetarians in those days, and the thought of growing up without steak was more frightening than the possibility of nuclear annihilation.

More than half a century later, I’m pleased to report that the T-bone remains available, although at today’s prices Mr. Means may have been onto something.

College brought another assortment of anxieties. Political assassinations, serial killers, foreign wars, pollution, and the general suspicion that civilization was hanging by a thread.

Environmental concerns were legitimate. Industrial pollution was real, and cleaning up our rivers and streams was long overdue. But somewhere along the way, environmentalism acquired a political dimension that seemed less interested in cleaning up the creek than in rearranging the entire American economic system.

Apparently, capitalism was becoming almost as dangerous as the pollution itself.

Then came Ronald Reagan.

When Reagan was elected in 1980, much of the political left reacted as though the country had just handed the nuclear launch codes to a Hollywood actor who couldn’t wait to use them.

We were warned that nuclear war was practically inevitable.

In 1983, Hollywood gave us The Day After, a television movie depicting the horrors of nuclear war. Roughly 100 million Americans watched.

Carl Sagan and other scientists warned about nuclear winter, a scenario in which the aftermath of a nuclear exchange could threaten civilization itself.

These were serious concerns, but the predictions often sounded considerably more certain than the science warranted.

Reagan, of course, went on to negotiate significant arms reductions with the Soviets and helped bring the Cold War toward its conclusion.

Once again, the obituary for civilization had been written prematurely.

Meanwhile, another army of experts was busily discovering that practically everything Americans enjoyed eating was hazardous to their health.

Coffee was dangerous. Then it was beneficial. Eggs were suspicious. Butter was practically criminal. Red wine was either the secret to longevity or a shortcut to the emergency room, depending on which expert appeared on television that morning.

Chocolate, seafood, wheat, and saturated fats took turns on the nutritional most-wanted list.

As a restaurateur, I witnessed this firsthand. Customers would arrive armed with the latest medical revelation and proceed to interrogate the menu as though it were a suspected accomplice.

One year they wanted everything without butter. The next year they were suspicious of margarine.

I began to suspect that the only truly dangerous thing about food was listening to too many experts before ordering dinner.

The Reagan years also brought predictions that his economic policies would plunge America into another Great Depression. Instead, after a painful recession, the country experienced a substantial economic expansion.

Of course, that didn’t put the fear industry out of business. It simply encouraged it to diversify.

As the twentieth century ended, we were introduced to Y2K.

The world’s computers, we were told, might not recognize the arrival of the year 2000. Airplanes could fall out of the sky, banks might collapse, and civilization could come to a grinding halt because somebody had neglected to put four digits in a date.

I never took this apocalypse very seriously. Perhaps I should have. But I figured that if the world’s most brilliant computer engineers couldn’t figure out what year it was, there wasn’t much I could personally contribute.

Midnight came. The lights stayed on. The champagne flowed. Civilization survived another evening.

Then came Al Gore and the increasingly urgent warnings about global warming.

Climate change is a legitimate scientific concern, but its political presentation often seemed designed to make people believe disaster was waiting just beyond the next presidential election.

Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize, made a famous documentary, and became perhaps the world’s best-known spokesman for impending environmental catastrophe.

I began to wonder whether predicting the end of the world might be one of the few occupations in which getting the timetable wrong doesn’t necessarily damage your career.

With Donald Trump’s arrival, political anxiety reached an entirely new level. Every morning seemed to bring another announcement that democracy, the economy, the environment, or Western civilization was on its last legs.

Then came COVID-19, a genuine catastrophe that took more than a million American lives and permanently altered how we live and work.

The pandemic also introduced a new vocabulary of fear, conflicting advice, and experts who seemed to change their minds almost as frequently as the people giving nutritional advice.

We discovered that we could work from home, attend meetings without leaving the kitchen, and conduct much of our business wearing pajamas.

This wasn’t necessarily progress. I always thought one of civilization’s more important achievements was persuading grown men to put on trousers before going to work.

When Joe Biden entered the White House, the political language changed, although the country’s problems certainly didn’t disappear. Some disturbances were described as “mostly peaceful,” while critics of the administration were assured that experienced professionals had everything under control.

I found myself missing the days when a president could answer a question without requiring his staff to explain what he had meant afterward.

Now, with Trump’s return, we have acquired yet another potential threat to human existence: artificial intelligence.

AI is going to eliminate our jobs, destroy our privacy, manipulate our thoughts, replace human creativity, and perhaps eventually decide that it no longer needs us around.

And naturally, a whole new generation of experts has emerged to explain precisely how terrified we should be.

I don’t pretend to understand everything about artificial intelligence. I do understand that it is powerful, that it deserves serious attention, and that it will undoubtedly change our lives.

But I’ve also noticed that predicting disaster has become a rather profitable profession. Some experts seem to make an excellent living explaining why the rest of us may soon be unemployed.

After seven decades of warnings, I’ve arrived at a relatively simple conclusion.

Fear is a necessary human emotion. Without it, our ancestors probably wouldn’t have survived long enough to become our ancestors. But there’s a considerable difference between recognizing danger and allowing other people to make a living frightening us.

Politicians understand this. So do television producers, advertisers, activists, and a growing collection of self-appointed experts.

Fear captures attention. Fear motivates voters. Fear raises money. And fear, unlike that T-bone steak from my high school classroom, never seems to be in short supply.

There is, of course, one prediction about the future that I can make with absolute confidence.

Every one of us is eventually going to die.

I came to terms with that sometime in the 1980s, and frankly, it has simplified my outlook considerably.

We’re passengers on a small planet that was here long before we arrived and will almost certainly be here long after we’ve departed. We get a limited amount of time to enjoy the trip.

My advice is to pay attention, use common sense, and maintain a healthy skepticism toward anyone who insists the world will end unless we follow his instructions.

And if you happen to come across a good T-bone steak, order it.

After all, according to Mr. Means, we ran out of those about fifty years ago.

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Jimmy Banakis is a life-long restaurateur.  He was an honorary batboy for the White Sox in 1964. He attended Oak Park River Forest High School, Nebraska Wesleyan University, and Chicago-Kent Law School.  He claims the kitchen is the room he’s most comfortable in anywhere in the world. He published an extremely limited-edition family cookbook. He’s a father and grandfather, and lives in Downers Grove Il.