What a week. A common refrain I’ve had over the years has been: “what would 9/11 have looked like with smartphones?” We haven’t seen conflict like this in a long time, and the last time we didn’t have social media, let alone smartphones.
When I started writing New Battle Lines in the beginning of February, I thought war was likely, in large part due to Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography and Peter Zeihan’s The Accidental Superpower & Disunited Nations. Both illustrated why Russia felt threatened, what it would likely do, and how it would do it. Now that it’s happening, that question I mentioned above is being answered.
There’s something eerily unsettling about sitting at a desk making financial models and knowing that halfway across the world software engineers are taking arms and making Molotovs. Even more, you can open up your phone and see photos and videos that these people are sharing with the world.
Back in prior centuries, people would only get news updates once a day from their newspaper, maybe a bit more through the radio. Today it’s non-stop, and you have to voluntarily pull yourself out of the information stream, which is really hard to do. Once you add a war to the mix, it’s even harder to manage. The power of the Internet is fully on display, and this conflict has only just started.
Ukraine
One of the many heart wrenching videos I saw was a parent filming outside her window, when fighter jets flew overhead, launching missiles. The daughter’s screams pierced through the roar of the explosions.
There’s not really much to say that hasn’t already been written regarding what’s happening in Ukraine, and Kyiv in particular. This is one of the handful of ineffable moments in my life. It’s maddening, heartbreaking, troubling, and so much more. I continue searching for words to convey how I feel, and I’m left just staring at the wall of my apartment, unable to comprehend how different it is some ~5,000 miles away from here.
No one really knows what happens from here on out, which is why I’ve been reading, writing, and thinking — so I can try to best position myself for the whole range of possible outcomes, whatever they may be.
Last week I shared the lessons I gathered from what the last century looked like, and began sharing how that shaped how I view today. I plan on continuing to do that, but given how quickly everything’s changed, I am interjecting to share a collection of thoughts I’ve had from the past week.
It’s been hard to keep up with all the news. Almost every tweet in my Twitter feed has been high signal, and I’ve been reading and researching voraciously as a result. It’s hard to process how these things happen, and how quickly things can spin out of control. But we must grapple with it. You can’t look away and pretend it’s not there. That’s not what heroes do.
Emotional Terminal Velocity
One of the podcasters I like, Chris Williamson of the Modern Wisdom Podcast, talks about this notion of emotional terminal velocity — the idea that as a species, we are close to this line where we reach a point where our emotional elixir results in catastrophe. We might not be biologically built to survive together in the long run. Other species might have had it, Chris wonders. Maybe that’s why we haven’t seen aliens — they were too emotionally charged, and they ultimately killed themselves off.
I’ve thought about that a lot. Especially with regards to war. What does it really mean to be human? So much of our history is filled with desolation and violence. It’s grim to grapple with.
And yet, there’s a certain beauty to what’s happened this week, in a very twisted way. People are stuck in the most horrible of circumstances, and yet they face the end with a steadfast, indelible bravery. They keep fighting for the life they believe in, and the world has rallied together in support.
I’ve lost count of how many times this week I’ve been in awe of what ordinary people are doing in the face of such danger. It’s a remarkable window into how resilient we really are. Whether it was the brave soldiers on Snake Island, or the video of a man carrying a landmine off the road with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, these waves of videos illustrate something that was also on display on 9/11. When bad things happen, good people do great things. Those dark circumstances illustrate that when given the opportunity, anyone can become a hero — overwhelmingly, we see that many do. And when people choose that path, it invariably provides hope.
Hope
Sometimes unbridled hope is disingenuous and inappropriate. But war is one of the places where it’s the most important. No matter the odds or situation, there’s an underlying reason why people are doing what they’re doing. Evil will always exist, but if hope is there to confront it, then it can push back, preventing it from latching on to anything permanently.
Post of growing up is realizing that everyone is figuring things out as they go along. Society is doing that too, as a species we always have. It makes sense after all. You can’t plan so far ahead when you’re trying to make ends meet, let alone trying to catch and eat some meat. So History Rhymes, and we’re left with cycles that give us both prosperity and turmoil.
Yet today is a testament to our collective resolve. Our ability to overcome. Of pushing for what we believe in. Individually, some lives have been horribly wasted or squandered over the centuries, but they mean something, because the entire global chain of events for the past millennia have led to this very moment. And it’s in this moment that we find a new challenge and opportunity.
In Always Remember, I talked about the most preposterous experiment we’ve ever embarked on.1 Well, to continue that thought, we’re nature’s most ambitious experiment. If you’re religious, then this very sentiment embodies what you believe in: Created in the image of the Creator. We probably shouldn’t be here — we know Homo Sapiens have almost gone extinct multiple times, but for whatever reason we’re living and breathing right now.
This brings us back to hope. Regardless of your beliefs, we can all agree that hope helps us overcome adversity, because it gives us something to fight for. Today I write this offering what I can, with the hope that others will do the same. We’re all living on this pale blue dot together, and after the past week, I’m optimistic that people are thinking about that more than ever.
In the face of such horrors, I think about how bleak it must’ve been living at different periods of human history. However here we are, even after all these dark moments. I think that speaks to our species ability to pull back from emotional terminal velocity. We certainly dance close to that edge, but when things reach a precipice, it seems that we wake up, so to speak, and get to work solving the problem. We escape that deadly fate. My hope is that now that we’re more connected than ever, it’ll be easier to do that moving forward. It may be a foolish sentiment, but it’s better than not believing in anything.
I wish everyone reading this the best. It’s hard to handle everything the world throws at us, but we must move forward — together. That’s how life works, and it’s what the people of Ukraine are doing right now.
It’s become fashionable to proclaim all the ways the U.S. has faltered and how it will fail. Days like today show us that these bad things can and will happen. But at the same time, there are people who have committed themselves and their lives to uphold an absurdly ambitious idea of a government of, by, and for the people — one that had never been tried before. And without continued effort, this experiment will end. An unknowable number of people have paid the ultimate sacrifice in defense of this idea, and many more will do the same.
The world is quite crazy right now, and the past few years have been hard to stomach on multiple fronts. Today reminds us that America has faced many of these dark moments before. There’s no guarantee this experiment will continue, but it has because people believed in this vision and did what they could to keep it going. I know that people still feel this way. That should give us hope — we’re living in this very moment because people made astounding choices in service of a vision of something greater than themselves, in far more dire and turbulent times.
I’m living my life without fearing for it, and I’m quite grateful for that. The fact that 20 years ago I could live innocently just as teenagers are today demonstrates that Americans’ sacrifices mean something. We are all living through this experiment together, and I’ll never forget how special that is.