On the Laravel News site there's a new tutorial posted showing you how to use the "optional" helper and closure to help control issues where a property or method doesn't exist (or can't be accessed).

The Laravel Optional class and accompanying optional helper were introduced in Laravel 5.5. This class is useful to avoid those pesky Trying to get property of non-object errors in your code.

Joseph Sibler submitted an improvement to the Laravel optional helper that we covered in Laravel 5.6.13 which now allows a closure that is only called when the object is not null

They compare the "optional" functionality to the null coalesce operator and the cases when the former should be used over the latter. A few code snippets also help to illustrate the difference. For more information about this helper and other handy features, check out their other article with a "top 5" list of their favorite helpers.