As you may have read in my last column, I was recently made redundant for the second time in my short professional life.
History is a series of crises, of revolutions followed by periods of peace and posterity. The 20th century is a great example of how fortunes ebb and flow; from the calamity of the First World War to the cultural renaissance of the 1920s, followed by a Great Depression, an aggressive political surge towards fascism, and yet another world war.
The pendulum has been swinging towards calamity for a decade now, since the world changed for the worse in 2016 after the election of Donald Trump as US president and the vote for Brexit. With the Doomsday Clock set to 85 seconds to midnight—the closest it’s ever been—it doesn’t show signs of swinging back in a more favourable direction. For context, back in 2018, when we thought things were bad, the Doomsday Clock was set to two whole minutes to midnight.
Uncertainty has become the new normal, not only for those of us in our twenties but for everyone, everywhere. Whenever I look blearily towards the future, I see one of two scenarios playing out.
Option one: we abandon our obsession with economic growth and instead focus our energies on protecting the planet, which will, in turn, create a more equitable society for all. In this universe, I see pedestrianised streets, a functional healthcare system, community kitchens stocked by local produce, and many happy, well-fed children.
Option two: we continue as we are, pursuing economic growth above all else. In this scenario, our total embrace of AI leaves swathes of the population without employment, and sends others into AI psychosis. The temperature outside is either unbearably hot or unbearably cold, access to green space will be reserved for our billionaire overlords and children will be few and far between (because who can afford to have them?).
Anyway, I know both of these outcomes are extreme. I’m sure there’s a middle ground. But the fact is, I don’t see how we can possibly go on without some kind of drastic change. Either it will be change we bravely choose, or it will be change that is forced upon us.
No matter how much time I spend ruminating and speculating over imagined futures, my financially precarious present remains the same. Regardless of what life will look like in my 30s, I remain, as of today, a 26-year-old doing her best to make life in London work. I have no choice but to learn to live with uncertainty. Perhaps this is something that gets easier with age.
Shortly after my last column was published, I received a job offer for another content marketing role—this time at a well-established company of more than 40 people, which promises a little more stability than my previous jobs. I was lucky that my unemployment lasted only for a matter of weeks. I progressed rapidly through three interview stages in three days before receiving a verbal offer as I was leaving the last interview. This serves as proof that solutions can appear just as quickly as disaster strikes.
The older you get, the more life experience you gain, the more storms you weather, the easier it becomes to live comfortably in uncertainty. Even as I’ve entered the latter half of my twenties, I’ve noticed my tolerance for uncertainty increasing. After my last redundancy, I wasn’t so quick to panic as last time. I’d been through it before, so I knew I could survive it.
Whenever I complain to my parents (which is often) about the state of the world, they remind me that mine is not the first generation to live under the shadow of possible annihilation. As Gen Xers, their equivalent to the climate catastrophe and the advent of AI was the Cold War. We all survived that—so what makes the 2020s any different?
Not much, is the answer. Technological evolution, geopolitics and health crises will always be part of life. Instead of the plague, smallpox or the Spanish flu, it was Covid-19.
So next time I—or we, as a society—are in a period of flux, I will remind myself that what goes up must come down again. When the pendulum swings so far to the right, the laws of gravity mean that it must—at some point—swing back to the left and settle on a happier medium. Nothing is permanent, everything is temporary: the good, the bad and the ugly.
