Changes, yes, but this…

Sometimes I think about the generations that came before us and everything they witnessed within the space of one lifetime.

My parents had their version of the world, their parents had another. Go back another generation and life becomes almost unrecognisable. Each of them lived through their own struggles, hardships, discoveries and advancements. Things arrived that changed how people lived forever, while other things they had always known gradually disappeared.

I guess every generation thinks the world they know will remain somewhat recognisable. Of course things will change, but you imagine the basic shape of life will stay much the same.

I think that’s what surprises me most about my own lifetime. I expected advancement, better technology, better medicine, different ways of communicating. I expected the world to change. I just didn’t expect it to become so unfamiliar.

Particularly over the last decade, sometimes it feels as though we’ve crossed some invisible line. The way we communicate, the way we consume information, the things we argue about, the things we accept, the speed at which everything reaches us. Even our understanding of what is real has become strangely complicated.

Maybe people from every generation have felt this in their own way. Maybe my grandparents once looked around at the world changing before them and wondered when everything became so different too.

That’s the strange thing about living through history. You don’t necessarily recognise it as history while it’s happening. You’re just getting up in the morning, making a cup of tea, paying the bills and living your ordinary little life, all the while the world outside changes in ways you never imagined possible.

And one day, the things that feel extraordinary to us now will simply be the world somebody else was born into.