The Year Narrative Ate Reality

We have come to expect the future to be minutely and perfectly predictable. And then it rains after all, the train’s late, traffic is held up by a crash, the neighborhood is noisy, the job hateful, and the election doesn’t go our way. Trump. Brexit. The end of history. The fall of idols. A new virus. Booms and busts and out of the blue, #MeToo. The

Political and economic visions, belief systems and cultures are all suddenly up for grabs. With the collapse or serious decay of many (mostly Western) critical narratives – like the social contract, popular democracy, human rights and the right to privacy – comes a need to either refresh and resuscitate these ideals, replace them with older, alread

To stand apart is to look at the world (now) from the point of view of the world as it could be (the future), with all of the hope and sorrowful contemplation that this entails.

Is Homo sapiens capable of making sense of the world it has created? Is there still a clear border separating reality from fiction?