Perhaps the most significant shift is the collapse of a shared public reality. In 2015, we still largely trusted the same news sources. Now, we have epistemic bubbles. Depending on your feed, the same event looks heroic or catastrophic. The rise of populism globally—from Brexit (2016) to the election of Donald Trump (2016)—wasn’t just political. It was a symptom of a deeper fragmentation. Truth became tribal. The pandemic of 2020-2023 only intensified this: mask or no mask, vaccine or natural immunity, lockdown or liberty—each became a shibboleth for belonging.
If historians write about this period, they will call it the Great Acceleration —a time when technology outran wisdom, when the speed of change broke the machinery of social trust, and when a species with unprecedented power struggled to build a future it could believe in. We are not the heroes or the villains of this story. We are the ones living inside the question mark, between the old world that died around 2015 and the new one that hasn’t yet been born. our times 2015
These are our times. Exhausting. Brilliant. Terrifying. Unprecedented. And we are just getting started. Perhaps the most significant shift is the collapse