The Age of Reckoning

It’s not just every individual.

Every country. Every culture. Every community and every company. All suffer from the same problem, to greater or lesser degrees.

Self awareness. We don’t know ourselves. Not really.

We’ve spent millennia telling simple stories, passed on, around and down, to explain who we are and how the world works. It’s all been a comforting illusion. One we’ve embraced and entrenched. One we can no longer afford.

The last decade (and likely a few still to come) represents a period of expanding and often dramatic encounters, between billions of unique and intersecting realities. One where the world as it is comes abruptly into contact with the world as we have always supposed it to be. A direct product of the age of information.

Historically, we have been conditioned to see a little, because it’s all we’ve ever known. Limited by proximity and narrow networks, it’s all we’ve ever been capable of knowing. Now, for the first time in history, we are exposed like a nerve.

Opinions and Identities. Issues and Ideas. Life lit up in technicolour.

Nations will be fractured. Systems will be broken. People will struggle amidst the chaos and the status quo will struggle to maintain some semblance of control. But this is a transition to a better world. As overwhelming as it seems, it needs to happen.

Because if we don’t know who we are…if we’re not honest about ourselves and the realities we face…how can we work together? How can we make the right decisions?

Adapting, both individually and collectively, to a vibrant, beautiful world of billions is perhaps the greatest challenge of our age. I would argue it is the one thing more important than climate change, as it involves fundamental changes to who we are, how we think and how we operate. Changes that are essential in confronting all of the other overlapping and existential crises of this era and the next.

However that adaptation requires a level of sharing and cooperation never before seen. New language. New culture. New economic and political systems. New modes of communication, cooperation and creativity. We have to get radically better in record time.

This process of creation is an enormous burden. Both practically and psychologically. We’ve always required a narrative to explain the world and our position in it, particularly during times of crisis. But where that used to be a matter of knitting together a few threads into a warm blanket, now it’s an endless tapestry. Cold. Frustrating. Seemingly futile. It’s easy to understand why so many of us — all of us in some way — become disfigured by the process.

Twisted by assumptions, limitations and corruptions we have not only elevated, but derived identity from. ‘Civilization’ as we have experienced it until now, with its myriad of contradictions, is not only a manifestation of our many abilities and achievements, but also our many failures.

It’s as though the foundations have been pulled out from underneath. We built cities on the need to be close for trade and communication. We built walls and borders to defend ourselves against people we hardly knew. We worked ourselves to death on the idea that there wasn’t enough. We derived values from a self imposed patchwork of social constructions. We even projected ourselves onto others and explained them to themselves.

We built our world on a reality that no longer exists and if we want to build something that lasts, we have to re-evaluate.

We have to be willing to radically change not only ourselves, but everything else. Centuries worth in a generation. The biggest collective undertaking in our history. That means learning from and leaning on each other to weave a tale, vaster and richer than we could have ever individually imagined.

It’s not going to be easy. The last decade has already been a struggle and those to come, likely more so.

But we can no longer afford to tell ourselves children’s stories.

This is the human epic. And it’s only just beginning.