The comfort of the past won’t help us now

Why “unprecedented times” is both true and dangerous

The phrase is everywhere

There is a phrase you cannot escape right now.

You hear it in boardrooms and on podcasts, in news articles and dinner conversations, from politicians and from the person next to you on the train who has been staring at their phone with a look you recognise.

We are living through unprecedented times.

It is said with a particular weight. The gravity of someone delivering news that changes things. And the people listening nod, because it feels true. Because something about the present moment does feel genuinely strange and new and difficult to navigate.

But I want to push on this a little. Because I think the phrase is doing two things at once, and only one of them is helpful.

What it gets right

The first thing it is doing is describing reality. And on that front, it has a point. The pace of change is genuinely disorienting. The volume of information is genuinely overwhelming. Artificial intelligence is rewriting entire industries in real time, and nobody, not even the people building it, fully understands where it ends. The geopolitical order that held, however imperfectly, for seventy years is fracturing, with alliances shifting, borders contested, and the assumption of Western institutional stability looking less stable than it did a decade ago.

The sense that the ground keeps shifting is not imaginary. Something real is being named.

But the second thing the phrase is doing is quieter and more insidious. It is suggesting that ‘unprecented times’ have never happened before. That previous generations had it figured out. That somewhere behind us, there was solid ground, and we have somehow wandered off it.

And that part is simply not true.

Others were here before us

Consider what the generation born in 1900 lived through by the time they were fifty.

Two world wars. The Spanish flu, which killed between 50 and 100 million people in two years. The Great Depression, which wiped out savings, ended businesses and broke families across the industrialised world. The rise of fascism and the fall of empires. The invention of the telephone, the automobile, powered flight and nuclear weapons, all within a single lifetime. The complete restructuring of social order, of gender roles, of what work meant and who got to do it.

If they had gathered around a table in 1950, they would have had every justification in the world to look at each other and say: we are living through unprecedented times.

They would have been right.

Or consider the generation that came of age in the mid-fourteenth century and watched a third of Europe die of the plague in four years. No explanation that made sense. No treatment that worked. No way to know who would be next or when it would stop. Just a world that had, without warning, become completely unrecognisable from the one they had grown up in.

Every generation, at some point, has stood in the middle of a moment that felt like it broke the rules of how things were supposed to go. And every one of them had to find a way to live inside that moment rather than waiting for it to pass.

The hidden trap inside the phrase

Here is where the phrase becomes a problem.

When we tell ourselves that our times are unprecedented, we are not just describing our situation. We are also, quietly, reaching backwards. The subtext of unprecedented is: compared to what came before. And what came before, in the imagination, is always more stable. More comprehensible. More manageable.

There is a word for this. Nostalgia. The longing for a past that, on closer inspection, was not quite what the longing imagines it to be.

Nostalgia is a very human response to uncertainty. The brain reaches for what it knows. It searches its memory for a time when things made sense, when the rules were clear, when you knew what to expect. And it finds something. It always does. Because memory is not a recording. It is a reconstruction, and reconstructions tend to edit out the confusion and fear and helplessness of the original experience.

The result is a past that never quite existed. A golden age assembled from selected fragments. And the more disorienting the present feels, the more golden that past becomes.

None of this is a character flaw. It is a cognitive pattern, and a very old one.

But it is worth seeing clearly, because nostalgia dressed up as analysis is just comfort seeking. And comfort seeking, while entirely understandable, does not actually help us navigate the moment we are in.

The leader facing a team that is anxious and disoriented is not helped by longing for the days when people were easier to manage. The organisation navigating a market that has changed is not helped by the story that things used to be simpler, because even if they were, they are not now.

The past is not available. It never was.

What history shows

What the generations before us actually demonstrate, if we look at them honestly rather than nostalgically, is something more useful than stability.

They demonstrate adaptability. They demonstrate that human beings are capable of enormous recalibration under pressure. That meaning can be found inside chaos. That the capacity to act, to connect, to build something, to keep going, does not require certainty as a precondition.

The people who survived the plague did not do it by waiting for the world to return to normal. The people who rebuilt after the Depression did not do it by mourning what the Depression had taken. They did it by orienting themselves to what was actually there, as it actually was, and working with that.

Overwhelmed means paralyzed

So what does that mean in practice?

It starts with noticing the difference between the story and the situation. The story is “everything is falling apart and we are uniquely unprepared.” The situation is a specific set of challenges, in a specific context, with specific people, specific resources, and specific choices available. One of those is paralyzing. The other is workable.

It means asking smaller questions. Not “how do we navigate an unprecedented era”. That question has no answer and invites only overwhelm. But “what is the one thing that most needs attention this week.” Not “how do we restore certainty” but “what would a good enough decision look like right now, with what we actually know.”

And perhaps most importantly, it means staying in contact with the people around you. Uncertainty is lonelier when it is unspoken. The generation of 1900 did not survive its century by each person quietly managing their own anxiety in isolation. They did it in kitchens and communities and workplaces, by talking to each other honestly about what they were facing, and finding out that the person next to them was also frightened, also uncertain, also making it up as they went.

That has not changed.

Navigating, not surviving

Unprecedented does not mean unsurvivable. It means navigating without a precise map, which is uncomfortable, and which the brain finds genuinely threatening. But the absence of a map is not the absence of direction.

You can still orient yourself. You can still take a step. You can still pay attention to what is actually in front of you. And you can do it with the knowledge that every generation that came before you was doing exactly the same thing, in their own version of a world that had stopped making sense.

They found their footing. Not because the ground became solid again. But because they stopped waiting for it to.