Our columnists wonders about how this period of time will be looked at by future historians.
Sometimes I wonder about how this period of time will be looked at by future historians. Specifically in recent years, I’ve started wondering if we are heading for a societal reset.
The theory behind societal resets is that after significant crises like wars or economic calamities, societies reassess their priorities, values, and structures, and this can lead to a period of renewal and cultural shifts.
Historians William Strauss and Neil Howe have argued that history runs in 80- to 100-year cycles. The cycle runs in four stages: the first is High, a period of stability and growth; the second stage is Awakening, a period of cultural change; the third stage is Unravel-ling, a period of individualism and institutional decay; and finally, the fourth stage is Crisis, a major upheaval that resets societal values.
Have a look at that third stage, Unravelling. A period of individualism and institutional decay. Doesn’t that sound like right now?
We’ve shifted values into a world where people value individualism over community. Modern society prioritises personal freedom and happiness over communal obligations. The very word, obligation, is not something many people want to even hear. We’re shifting ever more towards valuing individualism over everything else. You know where I’m going with this, right? Yup, that social media does not do a thing to help.
In fact, the focus on social media, and more specifically how it is becoming the driver of the “attention economy”, gets me to the next point, which is institutional decay.
Now, whether this is institutional decay or not could be up for grabs, but I think that during this third phase of the cycle people have become complacent. The values related to taking care of society as a whole have fallen to the side, and people aren’t happy to have just their basic needs taken care of – every failure of government to provide them with exactly what they want is viewed as a failure of institutions.
This “failure” gets even bigger in our minds when we’re glued to our phones watching hot takes on the economy or the government pretty much nonstop. It makes us more knee-jerk in reaction and susceptible to misinformation.
People complain about the healthcare system and their doctors, and yes, modern medicine is not perfect, but it is the best we’ve got and gets better all the time. There is no reason to shun modern medicine and start believing the TikTok posts of some opinionated influencer telling us crystals will heal everything.
Does this mean we are heading for a societal reset? Maybe. Maybe not. Strauss and Howe’s theory is just that, a theory.
And the crisis does not need to be a global war, although that is definitely the most nightmarish of the options. A crisis could be a depression or a pandemic – except we already had that and it reset nothing.
We live in very strange times. It is not hard to make the argument that we are living in the best times humanity has experienced up to this point, and yet there are many who continue to complain.
According to various sources, including the World Bank and Nature.com, back in 1990, almost two billion people were living under the extreme poverty line, which the World Bank currently defines as an income of no more than US$2.15 a day at 2017 prices. By 2015, there were fewer than 700 million people living in extreme poverty.
That is a gigantic increase in living standards.
We live in a time with unlimited access to knowledge and entertainment for a lot of people. I remember thinking it was incredible to grow up being able to rent your favourite movies – well now, your favourite media is in your pocket, all the time, whenever you want.
And maybe that’s where we’ve gone wrong. Things have become so convenient that the slightest inconvenience is harrowing. Our favourite TV show won’t load. We get upset, turn off the router, rant about those bad, bad Internet companies; and then it loads and we’ve wasted 10 minutes. There was a time not too long ago that spending 10 minutes to get your favourite show queued up would have been considered great.
There are a lot of problems in the world. But for the most part, life is good for a lot of us (if you’re reading this in print or online, it’s safe to say that, I believe), it is improving for more, and we should be grateful for this.
Also, we should cross our fingers that if we are heading for a societal reset, the trigger will be something relatively light so we can quickly go back to binging our favourite show online. But maybe we won’t be that lucky.
