What Page of History Are We On?

And Why Is It So Hard To Tell?

Kyle Hall
Kyle Hall
Jul 28, 2017 · 3 min read

I know Donald Trump’s in the White House, and I know that for 9 minutes this week the Pentagon seriously thought he might have started a nuclear war.

Pictured: Trump’s last functioning neuron trying to escape, c.2009

But history isn’t about to end. Even if we do end up in a nuclear winter, it likely won’t wipe out all 7.5B of us.

Instead, we’re somewhere in the middle of history. And I think it’s a good exercise to try to figure out exactly what our paragraph in the solar system history book assigned to the class of 2728 will say.

Here’s a shot at it:

The 21st century was marked by the global diffusion of digital technologies. Ironically, as distributed networks grew in importance, more and more people moved to cities. By the end of the century, 80% of the world’s population lived in cities, which led sociologist Davyd Xi to coin the term “The Great Influx” in 2082. The movement to cities also led to the meeting of the minds that discovered the principles of chilly fusion, which dominated the world’s energy production for the next 300 years. Chilly fusion brought widespread economic benefits, with the definition of “extreme poverty” finally being rebranded in 2115 by the UN as “relative hardship”. However, this period was also marked by violent clashes that signaled the end of the early systems of democracy, whose 18th century roots did not allow them to adapt and peacefully coexist alongside exponential technologies.

That’ll probably be about it. If you want more details, you’ll have to find a bigger book.

In a world of 24-hr news coverage, tweetstorms, affinity bubbles, etc., etc., it’s hard to distinguish between the key developments and the insignificant details. This is doubly true because some of those details end up being critical in the writing of a paragraph like the one above; yet the vast majority are not. How to distinguish between them? How to save ourselves from having the entirety of our brief lives be eaten alive by details that won’t count next week, let alone next century?

I honestly can’t tell you the answer. I don’t think humans were good at doing this before, and it is only worse now that we’ve entered the Exponential Age.

Via Tim Urban’s incredible Wait But Why

The only thing that I would say is this: we’d be all much better off if we took 30 seconds every day to reflect on our moment in time, be amazed, and feel the utter smallness that we are — in the universe, in time, in history.

Then you can open your eyes, take a breath, and get back to your Twitter mentions. That shit is addictive, son.

Leave your own history book paragraph in the comments, and don’t forget to hit the 💖 😘

Kyle Hall

Written by

Kyle Hall

Ghostwriting, writing, reading…

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