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?

Reinhard Lackner@macf00bar@hachyderm.io

Replying to @hazelweakly@hachyderm.io

@hazelweakly
i keep coming back to this framing, because i'm austrian and it isn't abstract here. my great-grandparents and grandparents generation lived through what "precedented times" actually look like ... austria in 1918 assumed the collapse was temporary and then came 1927, 1934, 1938. the stable decades after 1945 were not the natural state of things ... people built them on purpose, because they had seen the alternative and wanted none of it.

chaos on that timescale is not one storm you wait out but is called "weather" ... with some stretches workable, some awful, and nobody can time either. so, i guess, the useful preparation is capacity ... not prediction. nobody in 1945 was saved by having correctly predicted 1938 but the people who mattered for the rebuild were the ones who still had skills, records and working relationships when it was over.

i would push back gently on "increasing chaos" because that assumes a trend line nobody can actually see ... but, what we can see is that variance is up and the old baseline is gone ... granted, a weaker claim, but it changes the answer from endurance to adaptability.

i've raced a sailboat across the north atlantic, so the weather framing is not just a metaphor for me. on a long passage you don't choose the conditions but you choose the state of the boat when the conditions arrive. reef the minute you think about it and fix small problems while they are small. most of the work is boring maintenance done in calm weather, which is exactly why the rough days stay survivable ... so, my answer to "what can i do about it" is unglamorous: maintain what a rebuild would need and uphold skills that keep their value when institutions wobble. keep records not bound to specific platforms and grow relationships that hold across factions. all of it as routine, not as emergency response.

Jul 5, 2026, 20:20 UTCen