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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.
