For the first time ever I felt something was off.
Something was changing.
That something turns out to be world.
Ukraine, Gaza, AI, climate change and ever more popular authoritarianism in democratic countries.
Why is it that suddenly everything started moving and shifting?
That was the question I was pondering. But it turned out to be the wrong question.
See, I'm now 27 years old, still relatively young on a human life scale.
I've never felt the status quo changing before. I did know that it did, but I never felt it.
The EU has always existed, right?
Germany was always reuinfied, wasn't it?
Everybody always had internet at home, didn't we?
The Twin Towers were always flown into, were they not?
Everybody knew the climate was changing, but wasn't too bothered about it, were we not?
We always had our armies deployed in the Middle East to fight terror, right? What else do we have armies for?
The Soviet Union had always fallen, hadn't it?
These are not truths and a quick glance over a history book will tell us so.
The fact is that the status quo that I've grown up with has shifted and doesn't exist anymore. And by now it has shifted enough for me to notice for the first time.
The world never stopped and won't ever stop changing.
So I must change with it and I must live with that.
Yep. I totally feel the same, and I know others our age do so as well.
What will 2024 bring? Where will we be in 12 months? For the first time it feels like that by then, everything can be very different indeed.