Hazel Weakly@hazelweakly@hachyderm.io

One thing I keep thinking about is how maybe the last ~80 years were the anomaly. That we’re not living in unprecedented times, but rather are finally reverting back into precedented times after decades of weirdness.

I don’t think about that to sit and doom. I think about it to ask myself the question about what now. What do I do if this is the beginning of the next 150-300 years of increasing chaos? It’s easy to roll over and wait if you think it’ll be over next week. It’s also easy to roll over and wait if you think it’ll never end.

But 150-300 years is just long enough to think about in human terms without entirely despairing about it. So the question remains: what does that mean for me, for us, and what can I do about it?

Gaëtan Perrault@gatesvp@mstdn.ca

Replying to @hazelweakly@hachyderm.io

@hazelweakly both the last 250 years and the last 75 years have been historical anomalies as far as I can tell.

The Industrial Revolution bought the fastest set of changes in human history. The post-WWII world order brought some of the longest periods of relative human peace and prosperity.

In the 250 years since the industrial Revolution started, the human population has gone from 0.8 billion to over 8 billion. That's been "normal" for 10 generations, but it can't be normal for another 10 or 20 generations.

Every year we harvest more energy from the planet in the Sun. But again, we can't continue this rate for 500 more years, or we are just absorbing the entire Sun.

On a planetary scale, this is all incredibly rapid change, practically instant. But the exponential curve has to slow down.

And fundamentally, that's the anomaly we've been living through. It's just that we've been living through it for 10 generations and people are still treating it as "normal" instead of anomalous.

Jul 5, 2026, 22:27 UTCen