There is a phrase, often described as an ancient Chinese curse, that goes: may you live in interesting times.
It sounds like a blessing. It is not. Interesting times are times of disruption, uncertainty, and change that arrives faster than you can process it. The opposite — stable, predictable, unremarkable — is actually what most people need to build a life. Interesting times are what happen to you when the world decides it is done being stable.
We have been living in interesting times for six years. Here is what I actually experienced.
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"The world of yesterday existed and I belonged to it." — Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (1942) |
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In March 2020 I was managing a company when the world stopped. And in the middle of all of it, my daughter arrived. None of our relatives could come. No celebrations, no grandparents in the hospital corridor. Just us, and a world that had suddenly decided physical presence was dangerous.
What I remember most clearly is the conversations. Online, yes, but somehow more honest than most conversations before. People who had been too busy suddenly had time. You realised how much you missed the simple things — a handshake, a meal with friends, being in the same room as someone you loved. And then something strange happened. As the world opened again, people kept the distance. As if we had learned to be alone and quietly decided it was easier.
The daughter who arrived during the pandemic now speaks Russian. She learned from our nanny, who is from Ukraine and became part of our family — one of those relationships that arrives quietly and then turns out to be essential. When the war started in February 2022 I thought about everything we had been told — that large-scale war in Europe was unthinkable, that the architecture of peace built after 1945 had made it impossible. It was not impossible. It was just something we had stopped preparing for.
I had read Stefan Zweig years before. His description of the world before the First World War — people travelling without visas, a sense of freedom and progress so complete that nobody could imagine it ending. He wrote about it from exile, having watched the world he loved collapse around him. I read it and thought: how terrible, how distant, how different from now. After February 2022 I read it again. It felt like the same book about the same moment.
Because it is not just the war. The far right is gaining power across Europe in ways that would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago. Elections producing results I would not have predicted. Borders that felt symbolic becoming real again. Military budgets increasing while education and healthcare are debated. PISA scores declining across developed economies — the next generation learning less, not more, in the systems we built to prepare them for complexity. The generation that remembered what the alternative to liberal democracy looked like is gone. We are forgetting in real time.
Meanwhile the Middle East is burning in ways that connect to everything else. The Houthi attacks, the Iran-Israel tensions, the Saudi-US dynamics, the supply chain disruptions that feed directly into the inflation that rewrote my financial plans. I had calculated my path to financial independence carefully. Then the purchasing power I had assumed, the returns I had projected, the timeline I had built — all of it required recalculation. Not because I planned badly. Because the world moved.
And here is the thing about climate that I cannot get out of my head. In Europe we are having serious conversations about plastic bottle caps and recyclable packaging — the granular details of individual responsibility. Meanwhile a Saudi oil pipeline catches fire and produces a black smoke cloud visible for a hundred kilometres. One incident, more carbon than most European cities produce in months, gone into the atmosphere while we debate whether the lid stays on the bottle. I am not against the bottle cap. I am pointing at the gap between what we are asked to do individually and what actually determines the outcome collectively. It is a gap that makes you feel slightly absurd for trying.
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"The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters." — Antonio Gramsci |
And then there is AI. Not just as a technology but as a question about the future of my daughter. What skills will matter when she enters the workforce? What does a career look like in a world where cognitive work is being automated faster than anyone predicted? I do not have answers. I have the question, which I carry alongside everything else.
Robert Sternberg called it AQ — Adaptability Quotient. The capacity to learn and navigate faster than the world changes around you. Not IQ. Not EQ. Something beyond both. The third dimension of human intelligence that the last six years have been testing without warning.
I have been building mine without knowing it had a name. Every plan I rewrote, every assumption I updated, every moment I stayed curious when certainty would have been more comfortable. That is the muscle. And the last six years were the training.
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But I want to end honestly rather than neatly.
Sometimes I read the news and I think: this is what civilisation collapsing looks like from the inside. The slow accumulation of things that should not be happening. The normalisation of what would once have been unthinkable. The sense that the systems we built — democratic, economic, environmental — are straining under a weight they were not designed to carry all at once.
And then I think: or I am just an anxious middle-aged person who reads too much news.
I genuinely do not know which one it is. Both feel true simultaneously. That uncertainty is itself the most honest thing I can offer.
What I do know is that I have read Zweig's book twice now. The first time as a reader, observing from the outside. The second time feeling less like a reader and more like a character in it — someone living through a chapter whose ending has not been written yet, watching things that should not be possible become ordinary, hoping that the trajectory bends somewhere before the last pages.
I think about Zweig himself sometimes. He lived through the golden age he described so beautifully — the Vienna of culture, of cafes, of freedom so complete it felt permanent. And then he watched it all collapse. He died in exile in Brazil in 1942, having given everything to his work, his writing, his ideas. He did not see the end of the war. He did not see what came after.
If he had known what was coming — if any of them had known — would they have lived differently? More time in the cafe. More evenings with the people they loved. Less planning for a future that was about to disappear and more presence in the moment that was already there. The interesting times we are living through are a reminder, if nothing else, that the future is not guaranteed and the present deserves more attention than we usually give it. Maybe the answer to interesting times is not only adaptability. Maybe it is also the deliberate choice to protect some space for leisure, for slowness, for the things that cannot be optimised or planned or adjusted for inflation. Not because the concerns are not real. Because the concerns will always be there and the time will not.
My daughter was born into interesting times. She will never know anything else. May she be better at navigating them than the characters in the book.
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This week's insight Sometimes it looks like civilisation is collapsing. Sometimes it looks like anxiety. Both can be true at the same time. What helps is not certainty about which one it is — it is building the capacity to navigate without needing to know. AQ. The muscle that gets stronger every time you update a plan instead of defending it. The last six years were training. The next six will be too. |
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