We live in a time of social upheaval. What work looks like has changed. What marriages look like has changed. How kids dress has changed. How we understand our history has changed. Our discussion about race is different. Even gender is fluid and up for debate in the modern world.

And guess what? It was like this in the ancient world too. That isn’t to argue that you can find precedents for some of today’s debates about gender and sex in ancient Rome; it’s just to say more generally that the only constant in history is change. People have always felt like they were reeling, like life was moving too fast and the changes it wrought were too drastic. It’s true right down to the first appearance of Stoicism in Rome, which Cato the Elder thought to be such a dangerous import from Greece that he tried to ban it!

Taylor Swift’s advice to all of you who are freaking out about this or that is fitting: You need to calm down. You’re not going to stop progress by banning things—it never works. It does the opposite. It draws the people you’re trying to protect more strongly to the thing you’re trying to protect them from. If it succeeds at anything, it’s heaping shame and embarrassment on the people who ignorantly stood athwart history and shouted ‘Stop!’ It certainly doesn’t make a great case for the old values—which do have value—to present them as so fragile that they need protection by any means necessary, including tyranny or cruelty.

Focus on yourself. Mind your own business. Practice some empathy. Try to, you know, understand. Let people figure things out for themselves. Let them break new ground. Let them find themselves.

And while they’re doing that, focus on what you control, like being decent and kind and open-minded.