Welcome to the second edition of Culture Therapist, T’s new advice column in which either Ligaya Mishan or Megan O’Grady solves your problems using art. Have a question? Need some comfort? Email us at advice@nytimes.com.

Q: You can’t help but experience Weltschmerz almost all the time these days. Divided politics and grim and growing economic disparities mean that it’s hard to reconcile the desire to have children with the state of the world you would bring them into. My mother (who was born in the ’50s and lived through the Cold War) says that the world has never seemed bleaker in her memory. Is it irresponsible, then, to have kids? Should we have kids just because we want to have someone to love and occupy our time with? Is there some method we should use to make a decision, or just get on with it and stop worrying? — Signed, Weltschmerz

A: Dear Weltschmerz,

I’m a worrier like you. I marvel at people who seem to sail through life untouched by self-doubt, much less by the existential implications of entire ecosystems burning down, but I wouldn’t want to be them. Finding clarity on big life decisions can be elusive during the best of times; these days, we flip ahead in the choose-your-own-adventure book of life with increasing trepidation. How will we ever mend the tattered social contract? Will Elizabeth Warren become president? Can we really fix all this? In the light of such major, pressing questions, personal ones can feel a little selfish. It’s hard to want things, or even to know for sure if you want them.

But here’s the real problem with trying to imaginatively cast forward into the future: You can’t know what being a parent will mean to you until you experience it. We can’t know what shape the apocalypse will take, and how we will react, until the seven horsemen knock at our doors. “The sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised,” as the poet Wislawa Szymborska wrote in her wry little poem on life’s fleetingness, “Nothing Twice,” “and leave without the chance to practice.”