I saw an old man sobbing in the street on Wednesday. I watched catatonic parents at the playground on Thursday, their children swinging back-and-forth, thankfully and innocently oblivious. By Friday, my phone dinged and buzzed with text messages from friends and phone calls from family asking how I was “holding up”—not too dissimilar from the caring epistles I received after my mother died.

Like all of us, I’ve laid in bed every single night since Tuesday consumed by my terrified imagination of the next four years—a pit of worry in my stomach, an anvil lodged in my throat, I’ve become an insomniac. When I look at my one-and-a-half-year-old son, and then at my wife and her expanding belly, which grows each day with our second child, I—like millions of people who call this country home—feel utterly rudderless, unsure what I’m supposed to do to protect my family from a terrifying, uncertain future and an unpredictable leader. Then I contemplate how much more scared others must be: Muslim parents, or Mexican children, anyone who isn’t white. A sense of dread creeps inside of me.

I’ve never once experienced the sort of despair that I feel with President-elect Donald Trump (just typing those words is insuperable) at the helm of this country. There is no denying that things are going to change over the next four years, and if you’re liberal, or even moderate, they won’t be changing for the better. Most of the Trump Presidential Transition Team Executive Committee is made up of climate-change deniers, people who are staunchly opposed to reproductive rights, and same-sex marriage antagonists. Based on the track record of Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who has signed into law one bill that forbids abortion on the basis of fetal chromosomal abnormalities and another that allow guns in school parking lots, we appear to be rolling America back into a previous century.

You’re probably feeling that despair again reading this. But take a deep breath. It may be naive, but I do think there is something we can all do to ensure the next four years aren’t a complete travesty.

To understand what, we have to go back to the afternoon of June 17th, 1994. It was a typically warm day in Los Angeles, but a spectacle was unfurling along the Santa Ana Freeway that would (believe it or not) help propel Donald Trump into the White House. As the clock struck 5:56 p.m., dozens of California Highway Patrol police cars, their cherries whirling red, began pursuing O.J. Simpson’s white Ford Bronco along the freeway. For those of us that can remember that far back, there was no such thing as Twitter, smartphones, or even reality TV. In fact, that moment on the Santa Ana Freeway, which was being broadcast live to 95 million TV viewers across the country, arguably spawned an entirely new culture—the opening of a orifice that has since given us Kim Kardashian and an alternate universe in which people are famous for being famous. It was a world, of course, that would facilitate the rise of a formerly bankrupt, multi-divorced, casino operator and resort mogul, first as a reality host, then an alt-right demogogue, and now, inexplicably, the president of the United States.

But while the origin of our current reality may be terrifying, it also suggests a possible antidote. As someone who has covered Silicon Valley for nearly two decades, I’ve observed a number of people transcend from being impecunious to being billionaires in mere moments. Each and every time that I’ve seen this phenomenon occur, there has been a consistent truism: these people don’t change with that wealth. Instead, it simply magnifies who they were originally. The jerks are bigger jerks. The nice people are nicer.