No matter where you look, people are saying that things are feeling worse than they used to. It’s said casually, almost offhand, the way we’d talk about how the weather is changing. It’s not urgent, nothing that needs you to stop and rethink where you are.
Life has a way of settling into itself. Days drift into routines, we adjust to the small changes without realising that we’ve adjusted. The pattern is just familiar enough that we assume it will hold, and that assumption becomes part of how we stay steady.
Civilisations, it appears, behave in a similar way. Each one presents itself as the exception, imagining that the story will bend around them, not through them. That belief sits quietly in the background, shaping how we all make sense of our world.
Why are we so sure that the present can escape the patterns that shaped the past?
What stories do empires tell themselves to feel eternal?
Rome built the idea of its own permanence into everyday life. The phrase Roma Aeterna was carved into monuments, written into poetry and even minted onto their coins, forcing eternity into something you could actually touch instead of something abstract. You can see how deeply this belief shaped Roman identity in this detailed exploration of the idea of the Eternal City.
The British Empire used somewhat softer vocabulary. It framed expansion as progress, describing its rule as a civilising mission. The language made power sound like a duty, not a choice. It turned its own authority into something almost like guidance, making the story far harder to question.
America did what America does and took this pattern forward through exceptionalism. Presidents and policymakers alike used the idea of national destiny to present the country as a unique project, destiny and democracy merged into a single story about a guaranteed future.
You can see similar moves in the present. China has framed its own power as a continuation of an ancient civilisational arc. Russia talks about its own restoration. Silicon valley treats its own disruption as permanent proof of its central place within the world.
Different cultures. Different voices. The exact same belief that decline belongs to someone else. That it would never happen to them.
Why does the human brain mistake stability for permanence?
We’re biased. Specifically the “normalcy bias”, which shapes how we see the world. We expect tomorrow to look like yesterday because our minds lean towards patterns that feel steady. We hold onto the familiar even when the familiar is no longer the same.
Optimism bias introduces a strange twist though. We know that decline affects people, but we assume we’re not those people. We picture ourselves as the exception without realising that we’re doing it.
This creeping normality makes a change even harder to notice. Every new baseline replaces the last one before we’ve ever had a chance to notice a difference. We’re adapting in such small increments that the whole structure still feels stable.
Belief perseverance ties all this together. Once we accept a story about how life works, it’s likely that we’ll defend it even when it feels like the world is raising questions. Research on this pattern shows how people will protect old narratives far longer than the narrative protects itself, as outlined here on Wikipedia.
I’ve done this, I’ve noticed moments in my own life where change snuck in quietly, and I only realised it long after it had made itself at home. I’m almost certain that you will have had moments like that too.
Mortality salience sits at the bedrock of all of this. When we feel the weight of our own limits, we reach for anything that promises some sort of continuity, and we trust them because they help us to stay grounded.
This bias is not a flaw in our wiring, quite the opposite. It’s part of what keeps us functioning.
Why doesn’t collapse feel like collapse when you’re living through it?
Whenever you read about collapse it always sounds so dramatic, but in practice it’s incredibly slow. It’s rare that anyone notices the first signs, we adjust to each shift because they arrive gently enough to fly under the radar.
Late Roman writers described a sense of numbness. Daily life continuing even as the wider structure is getting weaker. People carried on working, people planned for futures that wouldn’t arrive. This everyday rhythm made what to us was a very obvious decline harder to recognise.
People in the final years of the soviet union spoke about something similar. There wasn’t universal panic, more like a collective disbelief. The story they had grown up with felt so solid, how could it possibly fail? But despite that, the failure had already begun.
You don’t have to look too far to see the echoes of this happening right now. You can scroll past images of Gaza and watch scenes of unimaginable destruction in one moment, then see people acting like idiots in Tesco the next. Life continues because it has no choice. Even in the most extreme conditions, people still have to wake up, queue, and keep routines alive. The contrast feels disorienting. It shows how collapse and ordinary life exist side by side, and how our fragile minds struggle to hold them in the same frame.
Research on slow onset stress helps to explain this pattern. It shows how long periods of uncertainty have the effect of reshaping our sense of time and dampen our ability to track changes. A fantastic article on how stress affects time perception can be found here. Days blur, pressure builds, you lose the sharp edge you need to map the larger story.
The present always feels temporary, yet also permanent. Each of us lives inside this contradiction without really thinking about it, moving through routines that hide the scale of the shifting world around us.
We don’t really sense eras, only moments. This is why collapse rarely feels like a collapse, it’s life just carrying on, just with a different background.
Why do dying systems get louder instead of changing?
When systems start to get weak, it’s rarely quiet. They create noise, almost like they are screaming out at the void. You hear more certainty, not less. More declarations, more slogans, more nostalgia for a past that feels far safer than the present. Noise starts to fill the gaps that honest reflection would create. Stronger claims about identity, nostalgia being presented as clarity. People calling for simple answers because simple answers are safe.
I see this in myself. I was born in 1991, yet I feel a pull toward the 90s as though I lived through that entire decade with perfect awareness. Part of this feeling is longing for a world that feels slower. Going to Blockbuster and seeing the same shelves that everyone else saw. Sitting in front of the TV knowing that millions of people were watching the same thing at the same time. Culture felt communal, there was no algorithm whispering in our ears, telling us what we want or how to think. It was not a better world, but it felt shared. Maybe that’s why it feels safe in hindsight.
You can see this nostalgia playing out in the wider culture too. Here in the UK, the tone has shifted towards a familiar set of symbols. More flags. More talk of the past. More blunt claims of strength and identity. We hear people saying that “we need a war”, most of these people having never served in combat, or have never spoken to someone who lived through the last world war. It is theatre that stands in for understanding.
At the same time, people are blaming progress for the problems around them. They call for a return to the old values without asking why those values broke under the pressure of progress. There is no critical thinking as to why the old values needed replacing in the first place. They assume that the past was stable, and the present is not, and then use that assumption to build a simple story that avoids having to ask hard questions.
History shows us the same behaviours in other fading powers. Leaders in declining systems often spoke with greater certainty as their real power was shrinking. Their confidence rising as their grip on power gets weaker. The Alexander Hamilton Society have a fantastic article on civilisational framing here, that shows the pattern of late stage rhetoric in modern states.
Noise feels like action. It gives people something to hold onto when the ground is shifting. It replaces the discomfort of uncertainty with the comfort of performance.
But what would happen if a system chose honesty over volume?
Why do we cling to permanence even when history keeps correcting us?
Permanence feels safe. We build our lives on stories that tell us that the world works a certain way, then trust these stories because they help us move through each day without losing our footing.
Psychologists studying morality salience show that when people feel exposed to uncertainty or reminders of their own limits, they lean harder on the beliefs that offer them structure. Forgive me for using Wikipedia once again, but it explains this pattern really well in it’s article on terror management here. These beliefs make life feel more predictable, they soften the edges of our fear.
The COVID lockdowns exposed how fragile our assumptions were. One week, we lived inside a story about busy streets, having to go into the office, travel and a normal routine. The next week, we stayed indoors. Watching a world that felt so familiar shut down with very little warning. We learned that the rules we thought were solid, fixed in stone, could shift overnight. People struggled with the psychological impact because this change disrupted the story they used to understand themselves. It showed just how quickly continuity can break.
Identity relies on that continuity. We use the past to make sense of the present, we build plans based on the idea that the future will follow the same shape. When that shape is shattered, we lose more than routine, we lose the framework that helps us work out who we are.
Large systems run on that same logic. They need people to believe that the structure is stable. Without that belief, cooperation weakens and long-term projects start to drift. Stability becomes harder told hold onto when people stop trusting in the story.
Most of us grew up with myths that felt real because every adult we trusted treated them like they were real. I’m sure most of you remember believing that a fairy would come into your room while you slept and buy your teeth off you when they fell out. I never questioned that logic. It felt obvious because everyone I trusted treated it as obvious. Then one day, enough people pointed out the flaw in the logic that I started to question it myself, and then the whole story fell apart. The same thing happens with Father Christmas and the Easter Bunny. My dad even convinced me that there was a man who lived inside the cash machine and he’d count the notes out for you. These stories only worked because the world I lived in supported them.
It makes sense that people cling to permanence, but it’s not without risk. A story that keeps you steady hides the point where movement begins.
What does it take to let go of a narrative that once held everything together?
What do we lose if we stop believing in the myth of continuity?
Removing the belief in continuity removes more than just a story. It takes away a source of direction. Civilisations rely on shared expectations about the future, without those expectations the larger projects become harder to imagine. People stop planning. They stop building. We drift.
A society without confidence may protect itself from disappointment, but it may also struggle to hold itself together. Coordination depends on trust, trust depends on a sense of connection between today and tomorrow. When that connection breaks, we turn inwards. We focus on the immediate moment because it feels safer to us than trying to picture a future that we no longer fully believe in.
Even irrational beliefs have the ability to produce real action. History shows that people build more when they believe that their efforts matter. That belief does not need to be perfect or even provable, it only needs to feel strong enough to carry them forward. There is evidence of this in studies of meaning making across cultures, nicely outlined in this study on how shared narratives can create purpose.
Shared stories are so fragile though. They can only hold a culture together for as long as people trust them. When that trust is lost too quickly, collapse comes from the inside as much as the outside. Letting go of continuity can be as destabilising as believing in it too much.
Every generation faces the same choice. Hold onto the story or question it. Act with confidence, or flinch away from the edge.
Which option feels safer to you?
So what makes us so sure we’ll be the exception?
Each generation grows up inside a story that tells them their moment in time is different. We are taught that the world around us has a clearer sense of direction than the worlds that came before. We absorb the idea that whatever happened to past empires will not, could not happen to ours. It’s not something we say out loud, we just live as though it’s the truth.
We inherit these stories without thinking about where they came from. They shape our sense of what is possible, they guide our choices, they give us the comfort of continuity even though the world around us has started to shift.
Maybe that’s what makes us human, trusting the narrative we were born into because the alternative is too uncertain. We hold the world steady by believing that it will bend toward us.
Every empire thought the same. Every culture told itself that it was the exception. Every generation believed that the horizon curved in their favour.
Why would we think ours is the first to escape the pattern?
Authors Note
If this one felt a little different, well, that’s because it is. Most of the time I’m just sort of poking around at ideas like a confused Athenian trying to impress Socrates, but this article wasn’t that. It’s not a tidy philosophical puzzle that I can muse on until I reach an answer that’s “good enough for me”, it’s more of an attempt to look at the world as it is and say “Yeah this is weird right? Something strange is happening here, right?”
Some topics lend themselves really nicely to drifting around the edges, but this one dragged me right into the centre. I think that’s probably because of what I’ve been up to recently. I’ve been making my way through a 48-lecture series called History of the Ancient World: A Global Perspective, and I’ve also been trying to catch up with Foundation on Apple TV. They’ve both had this strange way of making me look at what’s going on in the world and think “Hey I’ve seen this pattern before!” which was a strange comfort until I realised that the pattern always ends in collapse.
There is also a really large part of me that keeps thinking we’re watching the death throes of the West play out in real time every time Donald Trump releases yet another wet fart out into the public sphere. It’s hard to convince yourself that we’re living in stable times when the leader of one of the most powerful countries on the planet keeps trying to (badly) gaslight us all into thinking he’s the second coming of Christ.
So yeah, this one might read a little more like an examination than a meditation. Less “what does it mean to be human?” and more “um, are we sure that this is OK?”. But the main aim is still the same – I’m not here to tell you what the truth is. I’m here to look at something that confuses me, poke it a bit, and leave enough space for you to draw your own conclusions.
I don’t know about you, but I always love it when I finish with more questions than I started with.
If you liked this, you might enjoy these
If this piece sent you down a rabbit hole, here are some books that live on the same street, or at least the same postcode area. They all explore power, collapse, identity, or the strange stories we tell ourselves about the future. Some look backward. Some look forward. All of them helped shape the way I think about the moment we’re living in.
Why the West Rules For Now by Ian Morris
A wide view of human history that tries to work out why power shifted the way it did and what that might mean for the future.
Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide by Nahil Mohana, Sondos Sabra, Ala’a Obaid and Batool Abu Akleen
Firsthand writing from people living through horror in real time. Honest, direct and impossible to ignore.
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy
A long look at five centuries of economic strength, military ambition and decline.
Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
A clear argument about why some societies grow while others stagnate.
Geography Is Destiny by Ian Morris
A reminder that the ground beneath your feet shapes far more than you think.
Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History by Lewis Dartnell
A deep dive into how geology, climate and geography set the stage for everything humans build.
The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel P. Huntington
A controversial book that shaped a lot of modern political narratives whether you agree with them or not.
Fall of Civilizations by Paul Cooper
Stories of past cultures that rose, shone and collapsed. A companion in spirit to the podcast.
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
A sci-fi epic that treats the fall of an empire like a maths problem. The Apple TV adaptation scratches the same itch if you want something visual.
Do me a favour and buy these from an independent bookshop. Bezos is rich enough. I’d strongly recommend The Book Hive in Norwich. You could also try The Feminist Bookshop.
If you can’t afford to buy them, then you can absolutely afford to borrow them from your local library FOR FREE. If you don’t have a library membership then you’re missing out, go get one now.
