The Arc of the Age
What if we’re living through collapse and breakthrough at the same time?
I often wonder what story these times will tell.
Throughout my life, I’ve never endured such a globalized sense of despondency as what many of us know today. There’s a sentence that I feel compelled to write now, like the next line in a song.
“The climate is _____, democracy is _____ , artificial intelligence continues to _____ ____ ____, and we’re all _____.” The blanks fill themselves.
The apocalyptic refrains have been expressed a million different times in a million different ways — adversities rattled off like items on a laundry list. I don’t even think it’s possible to address our hardships anymore without falling headfirst into the most tired cliches of our age.
If we’re speaking candidly about the present day, these dour preludes can feel almost required.
Frequently as writers, we feel compelled to sum up the unsummable. To ascribe meaning to the meaningless — or to moments so meaningful that no summary could ever convey them adequately. We attempt to draw patterns from an era too tangled to condense, cramming a billion things into a box of a single color.
But often it seems that speaking honestly about our challenges means scaring off readers who want something — anything — more than the same old fear-laced tidings of today. There’s no shame in their fatigue. I feel it myself. Contending with this constant deluge of doom and gloom is soul-crushing; we’re not built to consume so much despair.
Yet we may be hardwired to look toward it when it arises. It’s in human nature to see the bad before the good. Maybe our selective vigilance is much of what’s defined us and allowed us to thrive — to erect cities and to launch rockets and satellites into the skies. But it’s not a trait that’s well-suited to this modern world.
To be attuned to threats was a more useful attribute to have in a time when we fled from predators and lived in caves. When we’ve got supercomputers in our pockets that can keep us up-to-date on the plights breaking out everywhere from Los Angeles to Israel, Ukraine, and Sudan, our awareness of danger may serve as more of a burden than it does an asset.
It makes it possible to ignore wonder when it surfaces. Dire headlines prevail and blaring sirens steal our attention away from the copious number of positive stories that have quietly emerged from these fraught times.
On a given day, I seesaw between conviction in doomsayers’ most dismal prophecies and what’s actually a deeply optimistic attitude toward the future. The believers of a brighter tomorrow build a case that’s every bit as convincing as the people who warn of imminent species-wide collapse.
Virulent diseases are being treated, malaria is on its way to being eradicated completely, and HIV — once a slow and painful death sentence — is less of a threat to people today than ever before.
Even as the United States backtracks in its fight against climate change, the broader world barrels ahead with green initiatives.
While artificial intelligence threatens to alter life on earth as we know it, it’s also ushered in the greatest leap in human knowledge since the Scientific Revolution. We’re rapidly inventing new drugs and vaccines as we algorithmically decode genomes. We’re making sense of the deep-sea dialogue between whales. Some day soon, AI may even enable us to watch our dreams back on TV screens.
Within a few years, I expect that we’ll finally bridge the gap between brains and computers.
We’ve built particle colliders and launched space telescopes into the distant cosmos. We’re learning more about our origins and peeling back more of the curtain to life’s most daunting enigmas with each passing day.
Many of us were born into a world where the vast reservoir of once-impossible was already shrinking in our rear-view mirror. Flight. Space travel. The entirety of human knowledge darting through the air around us at light speed and catering to ten trillion varied demands. We’ve achieved things that could never have even been imagined by people of the not-so-distant past.
It’s easy to believe that the defining story of our times is one of unraveling. Maybe that’s what most of us will remember them for. But when it’s all said and done, and these frenetic days are compiled into history books, I’m not so sure our chapter will be considered a bad one. Historians looking back on the tale of the 2000s might see the innovation before all else. It may be seen as a light so dazzling that it eclipses all of our obstacles— trivializes impassable mountains to the point where they’re barely footnotes.
They might see our progress before they do the wars, disease outbreaks, and disparities. They might look back on today as an era of resilience and breakneck acceleration and adaptation instead of a dark age of fear and disunion.
Maybe the arc of change can only begin to appear linear in hindsight. The spasmodic leaps of our day-to-day lives start to meld into a steady incline as weeks give way to centuries. Dips that feel like chasms may not even register as speed bumps in the grand picture. The greater slope of progress doesn’t account for each stumble along the way. Some tensions and conflicts are so fleeting that they do nothing to truly derail our march forward.
As with any data set, the bigger the sample, the clearer the pattern that emerges. Measured across whole centuries, even a parabolic slope upward leaves room for periods of pandemonium. A decade of disarray doesn’t negate a millennium of progress. It’s a small figure in the overall equation. A drop of red ink in a churning, cerulean ocean too vast to stain.
There’s no making sense of each of life’s moving parts as they’re flailing all around us. It’s only in retrospect that we can begin to draw coherence from chaos. To reflect back on historic crossroads with the detachment of people no longer entangled in the noise.
Progress is messy. It’s hard to discern growth for what it is when we live in such vertiginous times.
I like to reflect back on the Renaissance, and how hectic and violent that period really was. Plagues still roamed the cities, the rift between the rich and poor was chasmic, and wars remained a tireless drumbeat beneath all of it. If you were alive then, it probably didn’t feel like you were living in a golden age. And yet — from that miasma came some of the most profound shifts in science, art, and philosophy that the Western world had ever seen.
Maybe one day — as we sit on the porch with great grand kids on our laps — we’ll view this current focal point through a sufficiently wide aperture. Maybe we’ll find ways to romanticize these trials and tribulations. To speak of them with the solemn sighs of fractured times gone by. Even pandemics can become happy ghosts. Tragedies tamed with the passage of enough time.
Too often, we see the world through a binary lens. We believe that certain decades were about expansion and others about collapse — and that the present moment is the latter. But what if the truth is less plain? What if we’re living through collapse and expansion simultaneously? What if the very fact that it feels overwhelming is evidence not just of decline, but of scale — of our ceaseless sprawl upward, forward, and outward. Faster, faster, and faster. Bigger, brighter, and stranger.
There’s something unprecedented about this moment. There’s no use denying it. But this brave new world isn’t blinding only because it’s dangerous. Like the cosmos curled tight before it flared into being, we ache from the weight of unbearable compression. A thousand different forces each pull at different ends and blur into cacophony.
We’re living in the most momentous time in human history. The most interconnected, the most documented, and the most misrepresented. The most emotionally saturated. The noise is louder and the stakes are higher.
And still — we pirouette on rooftops and paint murals and compose music and fall in love. We develop absurd obsessions and take photos of the million billion things around us in the world we find beautiful. We AirDrop memes and TikTok dance our way through pandemics and find wonderfully varied ways to cope with ever-dizzying times.
That doesn’t cancel out the horrors of the modern world. But it complicates the narrative. And it falls on us to navigate that dissonance. To keep showing up and toiling around in this strange, delightful mess we’re each a part of. To revel in the open-ended oddity of life on Planet Earth, and to live our days in awestruck ignorance of what story these times will ultimately tell.
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The universe has an infinite range of frequencies from which harmonics can be selected to minimize dissonence.
For centiries music has played with this physical presence e.g. modern jazz.
We all have to make our own music.
Same :)