kels(dot)blog

May you live in interesting times.

I first heard this phrase on an episode of White Collar.

“A good mystery makes life interesting,” Neil says.

“You know the Chinese curse,” Mozzie quips. “May you live in interesting times.”

“Well you know, that’s the first of two curses,” Neil replies.

“What’s the other one?”

“May you find what you’re looking for.”

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While widely attributed to China and their… affinity for curses, I guess, there’s no evidence to suggest that any such Chinese expression even exists. The nearest related Chinese phrase translates as “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos.” By our best estimation, the rumour began spreading throughout England in the early to mid 1900s, and because humans are collectively a terrible gossip and also mighty shit at fact-checking, here we are today.

Chinese curse or not, it’s still about the worst thing you can wish on someone in 2025. May you live in interesting times. May you grow so desensitized to the news that nothing short of alien invasion shocks you. May you never sleep easy again!

I wouldn’t no, I would. I would wish this curse on several enemies.

I remarked to JJ that I knew I was getting older because some of the Beaverton‘s satire articles are starting to fool me. “Bruce Fanjoy wins Battle River-Crowfoot by-election” registered in my brain as real news this morning. And it is a good headline, but it also raises the question: why didn’t I realize that was satire until 25 minutes later? I’m not stup—I’m not that stupid.

I have a theory. I think it’s growing increasingly difficult to write satire. We wake up in the morning and get hit with a constant barrage of news, each article more ridiculous than the last. How is anyone supposed to dream up a story more unbelievable than what is actually happening right now?

We live in unprecedented times. Capitalism is in its end stages but still thrives, as evidenced by the bubblegum pink “Tired of Living in Unprecedented Times” t-shirt I saw for sale, only $29.99. Wealth and Power are now The Goal, and nobody seems to be denying it. Life has never, ever felt like this, so we must live in unprecedented times. Right?

I’ve been asked by a few people if I keep a spreadsheet on this. To which I usually answer… on what, exactly? On government? On global politics? On religious fanaticism? On the housing crisis? On the manosphere? On education? On what?

Data can only take us so far. The problem with the way everything feels right now is that it’s a culmination of everything. It’s you, and it’s me, and it’s how we were raised, and it’s the cost of living, and it’s billionaires and greed and geopolitics and religion and entire eras of history, and it’s the microplastics in our food and the trauma we sustained from Covid and it’s racism and sexism and Trump and it’s probably even your mother, and we could go on and on forever but when your problem encompasses the totality of human existence, neither me nor God has the power to put that on a spreadsheet.

But we all have the same question, don’t we? Are we worse off right now than ever before?

I don’t know.

The big reason it’s difficult to draw comparison between present day and histories past is a simple one: we don’t have great records. Humans have always collected and stored information, but data science has evolved exponentially within our lifetime. Something as simple as tracking wealth inequality led to a lot of questions.

When we measure wealth inequality, we use something called the Gini coefficient:

The Gini coefficient is an index for the degree of inequality in the distribution of wealth, used to estimate how far a country’s wealth deviates from an equal distribution.

It’s a fantastic tool for comparing countries today, but when we venture into historical data, we run into three distinct problems.

The first is that wealth has both exploded and fundamentally changed in meaning and function over the last 200 years. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to compare today’s financial landscape to any other point in history — that much, we can agree on, is unprecedented.

The second is that both sides of this equation haven’t experienced the same growth. The rich did indeed get richer, exponentially so, but the poor didn’t get any poorer. The difference between zero and a million is a fraction of that between zero and a billion. Billionaires, historically, are kind of new too (His Royal Colonizer excluded).

And the third is something that plagues every social-turned-data-scientist: this is only one tiny piece of the picture. Wealth inequality can be boiled down to numbers in a cell — but people?

This spreadsheet doesn’t account for the mother who can’t go back to work because her children’s government benefits would lapse. It doesn’t take into consideration the corruption that led to that being law. It doesn’t talk about the voters who elected a man that preyed on their fear. It doesn’t ask what led the people to be so afraid in the first place. It’s just math.

It doesn’t tell the whole story.

Wealth inequality was the first of many ‘problems’ I set out to solve with a spreadsheet, which now that I write it down, seems a bit hubristic. But I ran into the same problem with each one — the world was just too complicated, too connected. Everything had an impact on everything else. How do you quantify that?

We can only make an educated guess as to whether or not we’re in the worst of history. In fact, ‘unprecedented’ doesn’t even skew toward to the negative in definition: it simply means never known or done before.

And with that definition, I look at what’s happening around us and I realize that… actually, no, these aren’t unprecedented times at all. Terrible? Yes. A dark point in history? Easily.

But unprecedented? Never known? Never done before? It seems as if every billionaire and politician is pulling exclusively from The Big Book of Things Humans Have Done Before. We literally have modern-day Nazis. They didn’t even change the name!

And yes, it’s all horrifying. It is slap-you-in-the-face, we should be ashamed as a species and do the earth the honour of dying out horrifying. It’s terrible.

It’s human.

And it’s so human of us to assume that we are living through the worst of what humans have ever done. It’s so us to erase the stories of generations of women, going back centuries, all of whom survived their unprecedented times so I could sit here and air my existential crisis on the internet.

I once asked my great-grandmother what living through a war was like. She said she didn’t have time to worry about the war, she was raising kids. What I thought was a flippant answer at the time makes a world of sense now: life continues. As long as you’re living, life will go on.

So in the interest of life continuing, and at the urging of my therapist, I have resolved to start creating art again. Not for the sake of any further goal, but just to create it. Something to remind myself that life, uh, finds a way.

This blog is one such piece. A way to tuck back into the comfort of the early internet, where we created art and fiction and forums and built communities not through an algorithm but through word of mouth and virus-ridden email forwards.

May you live (and thrive) in interesting times. May you find everything (good) you’re looking for.