[Root_Denied]

This along with the groundhog dying the day before Groundhog Day makes it seem like there's some dice game being played by the gods for the human race.

A friend of mine said at the end of 2020 that his prediction was that "2020 will be the best year of the decade" and it's scary watching that cynicism come true.

[subsubzero]

There was talk of a recently written book that said everything is on a 75-100 year cycle of peace and chaos, and chaos was going to be happening again and soon. This was in 2018-2019 and every year since 2020 has been worse than the previous.

edit - book is the fouth turning, pretty accurate given it was written in 1997:

https://www.businessinsider.com/protests-coronavirus-crisis-...

[pintxo]

75-100 years is roughly 3 generations. Which is, I guess about the average number of generations we have in our smallest social unit: the family. I guess we learn a lot from our parents and grandparents, but hardly anything from our great-grandparents, as they are usually not longer around. Which means 75-100 years is the learning horizon within our families, and therefore for a big part of our journey to become social beings.

I am a bit worried that we are loosing quickly the last people remembering the atrocities of ww1+2.

[ben_w]

I remember reading somewhere that there’s a specific name for that period of time, but I can’t find it even on Wikipedia’s lists of humorous units.

[barry-cotter]

Saeculum

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saeculum

> A saeculum is a length of time roughly equal to the potential lifetime of a person or, equivalently, the complete renewal of a human population.[1] Originally it meant the time from the moment that something happened (for example the founding of a city) until the point in time that all people who had lived at the first moment had died. At that point a new saeculum would start. According to legend, the gods had allotted a certain number of saecula to every people or civilization; the Etruscans, for example, had been given ten saecula.[2

[ben_w]

Thanks! :)

[coffeeblack]

Maybe the Internet and its function as memory of humankind may break that cycle in the future?

[chii]

but books has been available for a long time - wouldn't this have made a difference?

[coffeeblack]

Books are more abstract. The internet has video and sound and casual conversations and memes and the daily trivialities of the life of millions of ordinary people.

If books and newspapers made a as difference when they were new, I don’t know. But now I want to know.

[junon]

Indexing, barrier to entry, higher degree of perspectives and levels of explanation/understanding, different mediums, etc.

[groby_b]

Unfortunately, large parts of human memory are 404.

I wish that was just a pithy remark - link rot is really, and it's rapid. Add to that that modern paper is deteriorating at a rapid pace, and the memory of humankind is starting to look shaky.

[pintxo]

The internet is pull-based. Grandparents push their experiences to their offspring.

[coffeeblack]

True. But I could imagine that 100 years from now, kids may browse the Facebook feed of their great grandparents, maybe even as a immersive 3D recreation of the life of their relative from a century ago. Including all their personal notes and thoughts.

[ssully]

Only speaking for myself here, but I thought 2021 was much better than 2020. With that said, it is better in the sense of "This shit sandwich tasted a little better than this shit sandwich".

[subsubzero]

2020 was really bad for sure, pandemic started, riots/protests, fires in western US.

2021 imo was worse due to pandemic being worse than 2020(delta), and now you have shelves bare, ships backed up off the coast of California. Inflation going very high, housing skyrocketing.

2022 was omicron wave(worse than delta) inflation getting worse than 2021, now war with Russia and gas spiking(prices at pump at levels never seen before)

[imtringued]

the current economic system is bound to collapse every 80 years because of some very basic math. insane people will try to blame everyone for a lack of discipline and simply restart the same garbage we already have

[vkou]

In 2020, it was not yet clear whether or not Donald Trump would be the last US president.

In 2021, that question was answered with a pretty decisive 'No'.

Between America not turning into a president-for-life sort of country, 8 billion doses of the 'rona vaccine getting administered around the world, and the second variant of note turning out to be a lot less dangerous than the first, there were quite a few metrics by which the trend of things got better.

2022 is off to a rough start, but there's still hope that it won't come to an early end, courtesy of a joint Topol-Minuteman peacekeeping exercise.

[trhway]

80 years Sun/climate cycle. We're almost on the peak of it.

[rat87]

> makes it seem like there's some dice game being played by the gods for the human race.

Have you ever read Small Gods by Terry Pratchett? Great book. Your comment reminded me of it because it includes the gods of that world dicing over a war of their followers

[Root_Denied]

Yes, and it was definitely who I was thinking of when I typed it out, along with this one.

“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.” - Good Omens by Terry Pratchett

[miriam_catira]

He plays with that same "gods playing dice" concept in The Last Hero too. Highly recommended. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34503.The_Last_Hero

[seanhandley]

Great book.

“Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.”

[koolba]

> A friend of mine said at the end of 2020 that his prediction was that "2020 will be the best year of the decade" and it's scary watching that cynicism come true.

2016-2019 were all better than 2020.

[oefnak]

If he was talking about the past it wouldn't be much of a prediction now, would it? He meant the decade 2020-2030.

[koolba]

It’s a pedantic joke that decades start at “1” and end on “0”.