This has happened before

Let me give you a quick tour of dates on which serious people, in serious newspapers, were certain that civilisation was about to come apart.

Student riots, anti-war marches, assassinations, racial tensions, generational conflict, and a pervasive sense that the West was eating itself alive. If you read the editorials from that year, they read like ours. The young have lost their minds. The institutions cannot hold. The country your children will inherit will be unrecognisable. The country those children went on to inherit was, by most metrics worth measuring, more peaceful, more prosperous and freer than the one their parents had inherited. Imperfectly. Not in every place. But on aggregate, yes.
Mass unemployment, the rise of fascism, the visible disintegration of the world’s largest democracy, and a real prospect of a second world war within the decade. The generation that lived through 1933 did not have the luxury of feeling dramatic, because the danger they were describing turned out to be precisely as serious as they thought. And yet that same generation, after surviving the worst war in human history, built the institutions that gave their children the longest stretch of European peace on record, the NHS, the welfare state, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The end of the world produced, on the other side, an unusually competent civilisation.

The Black Death, 1346 to 1353. Between a third and a half of Europe died in seven years. Imagine a serious version of this. Half your neighbours. Half your children. Half your priests, who had told you what it meant. Survivors did not just think the world was ending. The world was, in any sense that mattered to a fourteenth-century peasant, ending. And yet. The labour shortage that followed gutted feudalism. Wages rose, because there were not enough hands. Power shifted. Within a century something later called the Renaissance was underway. Hieronymus Bosch was born seventy years after the last wave of plague, and his paintings still look like nothing else.

I am not making the cheerful argument that everything works out. Everything does not work out. The point is narrower. The point is that the feeling of being at the end of the world is not, by itself, evidence of being at the end of the world. The feeling is a constant. The end of the world is not.

This matters because there is, currently, a great deal of money to be made by convincing you that the feeling is the evidence.

I will not name the people making the money. You can supply your own names. The model is the same across the political spectrum and across most languages: you take an audience that is anxious about modern life - which is a reasonable thing to be anxious about - and you offer them the diagnosis that this time, finally, the anxiety is justified. This time it is genuinely worse. This time the civilisation actually does come apart. The diagnosis is sticky because it flatters the audience for paying attention. Anyone who tells you that your fear is well-founded is, in a small way, calling you intelligent.

The diagnosis is wrong, mostly. Not because the problems are not real - some of them are extremely real - but because the framing is wrong. The framing of end-of-world is almost always wrong in the moment. It looks right in the middle, and ridiculous on the far side, and the people running the diagnosis are gone by the time the ridiculousness becomes apparent. The model relies on a steady refresh of newly anxious audiences, who do not remember being told the same thing in the previous decade, by the previous prophet, about the previous certain collapse.

I always loved history and the thing that struck me, repeatedly, was how almost every generation thinks of itself as THE generation. The generation finally facing the unprecedented thing. The generation that will have to either save it or watch it fall. Every generation. With remarkable consistency. And in every generation, the part that survives - the part that does the saving - is not, on the whole, the loudest voices. It is the people who got on with it.

My grandfather worried about the world my mother would inherit. He was right to worry. The world she inherited was, in some respects, much worse. In other respects she made it better. My mother worried about the world I would inherit. She was right to worry. The world I inherited had communism in it for the first 9 years and a different set of problems for the rest. I have done what I could with both halves. I worry about the world my own children will inherit. I am right to worry. Some of the things I am worried about will turn out to be real and some will turn out to be embarrassing in retrospect, and I will not know in advance which were which.

What this teaches me, mostly, is humility about the present moment. The present moment is always overrated as a hinge of history. Most moments turn out, in retrospect, not to be the moment. Most moments turn out to be one more morning, on which the kettle went on and the coffee got made and the kids needed help with their shoes. The moments that are actually the moment tend not to advertise themselves, and tend to be visible only later, and tend not to be the moments the news was telling you, that morning, were the moment.

This is not an argument for complacency. There are real problems in our actual decade. Climate, certainly. The technology question, certainly. The way the rich have arranged themselves into a separate species, certainly. The fraying of the institutions that used to do the slow boring work of holding societies together, certainly. None of these are imaginary.

It is an argument for the appropriate amount of seriousness, applied to the appropriate things, by people who have not been worked into a daily lather by an outrage machine that profits from their daily lather.

The serious people are not the loudest people. The serious people do not, mostly, have podcasts. The serious people are, in our era as in every era, doing the boring careful work that does not generate engagement metrics. They are the council planning officer who fights for a footbridge for ten years. They are the GP who stays an extra hour because the surgery is short-staffed. They are the schoolteacher who teaches your child to read despite everything. They are not in the news because they have not done anything dramatic. They are holding up the bit of the roof that is over your head, quietly.

You have a chance to be one of them. So do I.

The crisis is real. The bullshit on top of the crisis is not. Most of the apparent emergencies will turn out, on the far side, to have been the bullshit. Almost all of them. The actual crises will be the ones that nobody was filming.

What you can do, in the meantime, is keep your head. The people who keep their head during a panic are the ones the panic ends up needing.

This has happened before. It will happen again. We are not the generation. We are a generation. The work continues.