Why Does Every Global Event Feel Like a Crisis?

Key points

A person's tolerance for ambiguity helps predict how they will perceive social and technological change.

Poorly managed succession planning can amplify the anxiety of transitional periods.

Generational conflict is often a struggle over legitimacy, not just a clash of different values.

Every generation believes it is living through the most dangerous, most consequential moment in history. Public policymakers call this presentism or presentism bias : our tendency to overestimate the singularity and existential weight of our own time.

Psychologists would focus more on availability heuristics and recency bias: information that is most easily recalled, and more recent events tend to seem most important.

It isn’t irrational. The Prussian and the Roman empires aren’t going to