Please, may we all live in uninteresting times now
There is an old saying: ‘May you live in interesting times.’ According to legend it is an old Chinese curse, but as much as I would like that to be the truth – in reality there is no evidence for that. But whatever the true origins, it is a phrase I have had on my mind a lot throughout the last 12 months.
Since I was brought into this world in a hotel in the city of Kuching, Malaysia, in September 1993, it has certainly been ‘interesting times’. A year prior Francis Fukuyama had declared the ‘end of history’ – but it hasn’t felt that way.
Since then there has been the millennium, all the angst about Y2K, 9/11, the war in Iraq, 7/7, the great recession, austerity and now coronavirus.
You could say that these last 27 years couldn’t have been any more interesting – aside from if an alien spaceship flew down and planted a giant flag down in London or New York or Tokyo.
Although there is still plenty of time for that.
It is weird to think that the events we have lived through – over the last year in particular – will one day end up being questions on history exams.
People will write theses and books about the lockdowns in years, decades even centuries to come.
But unfortunately the simple fact of this being a memorable era means that turmoil has been baked into it.
Hopefully for the rest of our days, however long they may be, we will end up being nothing but historical footnotes.
Utterly uninteresting times that teachers – or our alien colonisers – will flick past in order to get back to the juicy stuff. Because I have certainly had my fill of living through ‘unprecedented’ times.
In fact I would be perfectly happy for things to be totally precedented for at least a decade or two – an era of calm and stability.
After Augustus there came the Pax Romana, an era of peace and prosperity, perhaps the world has earned a new Pax NoCovid – not the snappiest of titles.
But whatever comes next, once this pandemic is firmly in the rear view, may we all live in uninteresting times.
At least in the eyes of our future historians.