I’m sure most of you know about the apocryphal Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times.” I’ve often seen people lamenting that we/they seem to be living some really interesting times right now, and wished that they were living in uninteresting times.
That’s gotten me thinking. Is “living in uninteresting times” possible without either ignorance of, or apathy toward, events that don’t affect you and your life? Because it seems to me that there has never been uninteresting times in human development, unless you count, say, the isolated rural farmer who knows only a handful of people in their entire lifetime. Maybe during the hunter gatherer days, when it simply wasn’t possible to really affect anyone else except directly? I know there’s a non zero number of people who do yearn for that; I’m not sure I’m one of them.
Basically, I’ve been wondering what “living in uninteresting times” means, and what people envision when they wish for it. Nothing significantly bad happening? Anywhere? On what scale? Are the times uninteresting as long as you personally are at peace? (I’ve thought a lot about this when reading about people of a certain age who wax nostalgic about how utopic and hopeful and overall good the ‘90s were.)
I’m rambling a little, but I hope I’ve gotten my point across. Anyone else have similar thoughts? What have you concluded?
I think that depends if you mean worldwide or just “the west”. I kind of consider the baseline “business as usual” era as the time between the fall of the iron curtain and 9/11. I’d say “the times” for Western Europe and the US (I lived in the UK at the time, but we got a lot of US political news) were definitely very “precedented”.
But if you zoom out the rest of the world you have the Rwandan genocide, Yugoslavian civil war, Tiananmen Square*, the end of Apartheid, all of which count as “unprecedented”
I even remember thinking when Dubya was elected, “well the Americans have elected a complete idiot but it doesn’t really matter, the cold war nuclear standoff is over, they aren’t about to get into a war any time soon”. Though I imagine if was in the US the Bush-Gore election would probably mark the end of “precedented times “.
‘*’ - this predates the fall of the iron curtain it turns out. My dumb squishy human memory lumps this in with those later events.
Another thought I had is that even if you push the window back to include the fall of the iron curtain, then you are definitely in “interesting times”. But on balance they are “good interesting” not “bad interesting”. You had the feeling things were generally improving for the world, becoming less authoritarian, less violent (less likely to end at any moment in a nuclear fireball for starters), more prosperous, more free. I get this was somewhat a product of where I lived and how world events were reported. But I do think it has some basis in fact.
Needless to say I don’t have that feeling any more. In fact if I’m feeling pessimistic I’d say that was the anomaly and our current sh_tshow is just a “regression to the mean”
I’d push it back further as far as the US centric perspective goes. IMHO we were living in uninteresting times roughly from the beginning of Ronal Reagan’s presidency through the end of Obama’s. Yes, there was 9/11, but that was a one time event, and let’s face it, unless you were in the armed services and got deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan (or were an immediate family member of one of those deployed), those conflicts had very little effect on on us here at home.
ETA: From my personal recollection, I didn’t have the “oh shit, here we go” feeing when George Bush Jr. won. I did have that feeling when Trump won in 2016.
The replies so far have gotten me thinking further. This is where I am so far: I think that “interesting times” is either an individualistic state or an objective state of reality for the human race overall. If it’s the former, the whole concept is meaningless. If it’s the latter, then my OP was right in saying that there’s no such thing as “uninteresting times”; only the ignorance or apathy of an individual makes it so for them personally. (To be clear, I do not condemn such people. I have no reason to believe that a nomadic tribesman in central Africa necessarily needs to care about the state of the United States government right now. But just because he doesn’t know/care doesn’t mean that these are uninteresting times.)
Yeah, but I don’t want “interesting shit” constantly happening to me. I want to read about some new rocket being invented or some old rocket exploding on takeoff or some war between some country I never heard of fighting another country I never heard of over something I don’t care about.
All my dad had to do was not get sent to Vietnam, work for GE for 40 years, raise a couple kids to adulthood, and retire a millionaire.
In contrast, my generation was raised during a period of "nothing interesting / good interesting from the 70s until 9/11. Then it kind of feels like since then it’s been one massive crisis after another.
Your dad, like mine, lived in a uniquely uninteresting time in the USA. All of us raised by that cohort, including me, came away with a very rose-colored expectation about our lives in general and work lives in particular.
Reversion to the mean is a bitch.
Zooming out …
On a planetary scale we may be witnessing the death of the democratic and middle class experiment that got underway w the industrial revolution. At the high water mark maybe 25-30% of humanity wasn’t a barely educated peasant / serf. As a lifetime member of the ~25%, that experience seems like normal to us. It’s not; neither in space nor time.
It is. What really sucks is that we’re doing this to ourselves. The current problems aren’t due to an asteroid or solar flare or mutant virus or even global warming. It’s because a certain segment of the population woke up one day around 2015 and decided that democracy sucks and that it would be just dandy to try authoritarian dictatorships again.
Yup. Of course they’d been actively cheerled into that desire for the previous ~25 years by somebody, somebodies really, who stood to benefit from being the new version of royalty.
I think segments on both the right and left are to blame. It’s like they all logged onto social media one day and decided they could no longer stand the thought of people thinking differently from how they think.
So of course they would love nothing more than a dictator who can just come in and set things right without all that messy “democracy” they don’t understand.
