Empty vessels make the most noise. Nature abhors a vacuum. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. What goes up must come down. Nothing is new under the sun. This time is different. One man's meat is another man's poison. Not everything that glitters is gold. The early bird catches the worm. You can't put the cart before the horse. Make hay while the sun shines. There's a light at the end of the tunnel.
Ah, well. I've lost count of what else fits into this mosaic of accumulated wisdom. These are one-liners with a punch of clarity that nine times out of ten gives me pause and perspective.
In some ways, I can also view them as reference points that most times point towards an unchanging aspect of reality in a life documentary movie about the human experience from a rather objectively subjective standpoint.
I think there's this general observation on my part of not having tangible hard facts to rest on while navigating through modern life's endless gray areas. Everything feels provisional now, like we're all building on shifting sand.
I'm quite sure that being hyper-self-aware of what's seemingly going on all around this hyper-connected world is one of the main contributors, coupled with the sheer exhaustion of trying to find a signal in the static of information overload.
On the one hand, modern life is a disguise on ancient patterns. We think we're living in unprecedented times, but people have always felt this way. Strip away the smartphones and the streaming services and you're left with people trying to figure out how to live, love, work, and make sense of it all. Same as ever.
But on the other hand, something does really feel different now, which doesn't say much in terms of proving anything concrete.
I don't think that it's just a feeling that the old maps don't quite fit the new territory anymore, although this new territory hasn't been clearly defined yet. I'm leaning into the idea that we're living in an in-between state, caught between what used to work and whatever comes next, without a clear view of either.
Again, is something actually different this time around?
For me, there's only one variable that seems fundamentally different, which is speed and volume through which we experience everything.
The rate at which information moves, decisions need to be made, trends rise and fall, crises emerge and fade. We're experiencing it faster, all at once, with no buffer to process any of it properly. The human mind in its present form wasn't built for this tempo, arguably.
It could just be that we've "evolved" to tap into everyone else's uncertainty in real time. More "connected" to distant consequences and conscious of how fragile everything might be.
The reasoning here is we could be the first generation to experience the full weight of collective human anxiety without any of the old buffers, i.e no geographic distance or time delay.
That said, these old one-liners hold up and bring a strange comfort because to me they're about things that don't change: human nature, cause and effect, the passage of time. Others have walked through confusion before and left markers behind.
I come back to them when I forget that most of what matters is still small and local and happening right in front of me.
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