The rarity of now

It’s our desired political and social state, but, at the scale of human history, that’s an anomaly, really.

Democracy lasted maybe two centuries in Athens. Two centuries. In the sweep of recorded history, let alone the deep time of human existence, that is barely a breath. And then it was gone, swallowed by its own contradictions, by strongmen and exhaustion and the sheer difficulty of sustaining a thing so fragile and so demanding. We look back at it as a golden inheritance, as if it were natural, as if it were stable. It was neither. It was a wild anomaly. The modern iteration is even more anomalous, more rare and more experimental.

Consider what we actually are. Cognitively modern humans — capable of language and abstraction and recursive self-awareness — have existed for perhaps three hundred thousand years. For the overwhelming majority of that time, we lived in small bands, probably no more than a hundred and fifty people, knowing everyone we would ever know, embedded in landscapes that were legible and dangerous and alive with meaning.

We did not choose this life. It carved our nervous systems, our attachment needs, our hunger for status and belonging and narrative, all of it shaped by pressures that have not existed in anything like their original form for at most a few thousand years. And for most of the conditions I am now discussing, for perhaps a century.

What are we doing to ourselves?

We pack a hundred thousand people into a few square miles and call it a city and act surprised when people feel alone.

We build houses that are investment vehicles first and homes second, we hollow out neighbourhoods, we dissolve the institutions, religious, civic, communal, that once gave shape to a life, and then wonder at the epidemic of purposelessness.

Domicide is the word some use. The death of the home, not the building but the condition, the felt sense of belonging somewhere, of mattering to people who will still be there tomorrow.

The body still searches. That is what nobody tells us. The search doesn’t stop because the object is unavailable.

There is still the pull toward tribe, toward shared meaning, toward the kind of reciprocal recognition that can only happen at human scale. And instead there are platforms, products, distraction.

The hole doesn’t close. The need doesn’t dissolve. It just goes unmet, and the ‘unmeeting’ accumulates, quietly, in the body, in the culture, in the statistics that describe a human family slowly losing the thread of itself.

We have no evidence we are adapted to this. The experiment is too new, the conditions too strange, and the costs are already visible everywhere one looks. But we have evidence that we are highly adaptive, so I won’t panic just yet.