Our times are also defined by a new relationship with the future. For previous generations, the future was a promise. For us, it’s a source of dread. The summer of 2015 was one of the hottest on record then; now, every summer breaks that record. Wildfire smoke turns skies orange in New York. Floods deluge Pakistan. We’ve learned new vocabulary: atmospheric river , heat dome , zombie fire . Young people don’t just learn about climate change; they metabolize it as eco-anxiety, a low-grade grief for a planet we’re watching transform in real-time.
The central paradox of our times is that we have never had more power to create, connect, and know—and yet we have never felt more powerless, alone, and uncertain. We carry supercomputers in our pockets but struggle to focus on a single page of a book. We can video-call anyone on Earth but report having fewer close friends. We have mapped the human genome and landed rovers on Mars, yet we can’t agree on basic facts. our times 2015
The defining feature of our era is the total saturation of digital life. 2015 was the year smartphones became ubiquitous, Instagram redesigned its icon, and the "like" button began to shape human self-esteem. Since then, we’ve moved from social media as a pastime to social media as an ecosystem. Algorithms evolved from showing us what we wanted to see to showing us what would keep us enraged, addicted, and scrolling. The phrase "post-truth" was coined. Deep fakes, AI-generated art, and large language models (ChatGPT, Gemini) have blurred the line between human and machine creation. We are the first generation to ask, "Did a robot write this?" Our times are also defined by a new