#but tbh like. read samuel pepys. read corder catchpool. read any diary from any time in history tbh.

[mangled-by-disuse]

One of the most important things I've learned talking to older (like, 60+) people is

and I am being dead serious here

there are no precedented times.

(this is going to be UK-heavy bc it's what I know but I think it's transferable)

Before COVID, there was Brexit. Before then, there was the Great Recession. Before that, there was 9/11. Sandwiched between those, by the way, was the foot and mouth outbreak which felt like, on scale and impact, it should have been a decade's worth of crisis - but honestly sometimes I forget it happened, even having grown up in a hard hit area where you could see the fires.

And before 9/11, there was AIDS. There were the Troubles. The fall of the Berlin Wall, remember, the time so dramatically historic that it was declared the end of history. There was Thatcher and Reagan and the Falklands, the miner's strikes, the Winter of Discontent. People spent the 1980s inventing punk because the world couldn't last like this. My mum didn't want kids in the 70s because general consensus was that they'd drop the bomb before she got a chance to raise us.

And she had us anyway, albeit not until the 90s, and our whole lives have been an unprecedented, historical, unbearable fucking mess.

But so were our parents'. So were our grandparents (fascism! rationing! two world wars and a Great Depression! the fall of imperial politics! a major royalist reconstructionist movement! fucking Winston Churchill! most major cities in Europe leveled and completely rebuilt!), and their parents (Great War! Moroccan crisis! Bengal famine! Spanish flu! Russian Revolution! Glasgow was briefly an independent socialist state!), and theirs (cholera epidemic! women's education! Disraeli being a weirdo! Government censorship!), and theirs, and theirs, and in 1666 people were writing screeds on how it was the end times, not because of religious fervour but because of plague and famine and political upheaval and an oppressive state and false prophets and bad business decisions crashing the economy and shitty rich guys who think they're better than you but can't organise a piss-up in a brewery, and just

history is thousands of years of constant, apocalyptic upheaval. and it is not a new observation that every generation thinks this, right now, is the worst it's ever been.

But it's not. It's not the worst. It just looks different, and we have proximity bias.

This isn't sacrificing your adult life to unprecedented upheaval. This IS adult life.

I don’t know how to explain this well…but I’m 30 years old and I feel like I’ve had to ‘sacrifice’ my entire adult life to unprecedented times, the pandemic and daily anxiety over hateful politicians and whatever rights they want to take away on any given day and I’m just so fucking tired