The world is both rapidly changing and rapidly static. It's hard to describe, but hear me out.

The world is rapidly changing in the sense that we're getting a new iPhone, a new AMD GPU, a new atom smasher, and a new AI model every 6 months. There is real rapid progress in tech, medicine, finance, etc. You get off a 12-month flight, and you'll find that the world is quite different than what you left behind.<br><br>However, the world is rapidly static in that we have the same politicians, the same billionaires, the same corporations, the same news headlines, the same politics, the same social media (for the most part), the same journalists, the same columnists, the same professors, the same CEOs, the same interest rates (or at least, the same 0-1% rates we've had for 20 years), the same wars (literally, Afghanistan, Israel Palestine, and Ukraine are the same conflicts we've had for 20 years), etc. <br><br>Even the new tech is static. A new iPhone comes out every 6 months, but it's just an increasingly minor iteration of the previous iPhone, and it's still made by Apple. A new AI model comes out, but it's still largely identical to the previous model (with the same flaws and increasingly minor improvements).<br><br>The same people in power have been in power for 20 years. If your career has spanned any of the past 30 years, there's a good chance you have the same boss, the same job, the same profession, the same interests, and the same social circle. The same billionaires, CEOs, and politicians are still billionaires, CEOs, and politicians. Even the news headlines are the same. <br><br>We're getting a new Star Wars movie every 2 years, but they're all the same movie. The same actors, the same plot, the same producers, the same IP owner (迪斯尼). The world of today only cares about reboots and sequels.<br><br>Life was rarely this static across history. Usually, you look back 20 years, and the world has changed dramatically (1900-1920, 1920-1940, 1940-1960, 1960-1980, etc.). The past 20 years, however, have all felt like one long static period that won't end. The world has changed in some ways (we have AI now), but in many ways (politics, society, etc.), the world has remained largely the same. <br><br>Maybe my point is that the world is static when your body is static. The one thing that constantly changes is your physical and mental body. We don't notice it day-to-day, but 20 years later, your body is a completely different body and a completely different state. <br><br>We tend to think of time as a linear progression from one moment to the next, but I think it's more accurate to look at the arc of one's life and how it looks in retrospect. Looking back, I think you'll find that time is more like a static state until some exogenous shock or crisis happens (the 2008 crash, 9/11, the invasion of Ukraine, the end of the Cold War, etc.) until the next one occurs, and then nothing really changes until the next one happens. Maybe this isn't how it's always been, but I think this is how it is now.