History Doesn't Repeat Itself, But It Does Get Wi-Fi

Every generation believes it invented anxiety. Ours points to notifications, to the news cycle, to the sheer velocity of everything. Then you read a letter from some Roman complaining that the youth no longer respect their elders, that the city is too loud, that everything was better twenty years ago — and you realize the Romans had group chats too, just slower ones.

This is comforting, if you let it be. The plague of modernity has been diagnosed in every century since there were centuries. People in 1500 thought the printing press would rot everyone's brain. They were partly right, and yet here we are, rotting slightly more efficiently.

What actually changes is the speed of the same old story. Ambition, envy, courage, stupidity, love — the cast is identical; only the costumes and the bandwidth improve. A rumor once took three weeks to cross a kingdom. Now it crosses the planet before breakfast, which means we get to live through more history per day than any humans before us. Lucky us.

So when the present feels unprecedented, I reach for the past — not for answers exactly, but for the calm of knowing that confused people have always muddled through, and we are simply the latest, best-connected edition of confused people.