The Happy Catastrophe

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A fire broke out backstage in a theater on opening night of a new comedy production. A clown realized the danger and pushed through the curtains to alert the audience. 

They applauded.

The clown repeated his warning more urgently. By now he was center stage, flailing his arms, his eyes wide with panic. 

The crowd went wild. Whistles. Cheers. Raucous laughter. Never had they seen such a routine!

Is this how the world ends? The human race stands in thunderous ovation, calling for an encore, convinced it’s just another happy joke.

A Look back at the Biggest Events of the 2010s

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2010

The deadliest natural disaster of the decade happens in the first month of 2010: A 7.0 earthquake hits Haiti. 

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider successfully trap anti-matter for the first time.

Another team of scientists became the first to successfully create "synthetic life.”

Apple debuts the iPad.

Instagram and Pinterest launch. 

 

2011

The death of Osama bin Laden.

The space shuttle fleet is retired.

The world’s first synthetic organ transplant.

Occupy Wall Street.

The Arab Spring rises.

The number of social media users around the world reaches 1 billion.

Google+ and Snapchat launch.

 

2012

Hurricane Sandy hits the US East Coast.

A mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado is followed months later by the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

The first license is issued in the United States for a self-driven car.

 

2013

The Black lives matter hashtag is first used.

A terror attack takes place at the Boston Marathon.

The Mayan calendar reaches the end of its cycle—leading to a bit of hysteria.

Personalized DNA sequencing is available for under $100.

The Oxford English Dictionary selects “selfie” as the word of the year.

 

2014

Google Glass is launched.

The deadliest outbreak of Ebola starts in West Africa.

The US begins restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba.

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge begins.

 

2015

The first Apple watch is officially released. 

The Supreme Court strikes down state bans on same-sex marriage. 

195 countries agree to the Paris Climate Agreement.

The number of PCs used around the world reaches 2 billion (it took 30 years to reach one billion but only 8 years to reach two billion).

The number of social media users (worldwide) also reaches 2 billion.

3D printing enters the consumer market.

The New Horizons probe arrives at Pluto while Voyager I enters the heliopause (the outer edge of our solar system).

 

2016

The US gets its first female presidential nominee of a major political party.

Britons vote in favor of Brexit—the UK withdrawal from the European Union.

The Chicago Cubs ends the longest drought in baseball by winning the World Series (the last time the Cubs won a World Series was in 1908, 108 years earlier).

 

2017

TicToc is released.

Hundreds of thousands of people descended on Washington, DC for the Women's March. Though an activist first coined the phrase #MeToo back in 2006, what’s typically known as the #MeToo movement exploded in late 2017 when a New York Times article revealed accusations against an influential Hollywood producer.

 

2018 

A school shooting takes place at a high school in Parkland, Florida. 

California becoming the sixth state to legalize the sale of recreational marijuana. 

In the wake of Hurricane Maria, much of Puerto Rico is left without electricity—for almost an entire year.

 

2019

Simone Biles raises her medal count to 25 world medals and 19 gold—the most of any gymnast, male or female, in history. 

Donald Trump becomes the 4th US president to face possible impeachment.

The world’s top supercomputers achieve exaflop speed—that’s a million trillion calculations per second (a thousandfold improvement over machines at the beginning of the decade).

Abandoned by God

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Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, if you turn to Him then with praise,  you will be welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting an double bolting from the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away.  -CS Lewis, A Grief Observed

Living on Past Victories

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Never take it for granted that your past successes will continue into the future. Actually, your past successes are your biggest obstacle: every battle, every war, is different and you cannot assume what worked before will work today. You must cut yourself loose from the past and open your eyes to the present. Your tendency to fight the last war may lead to your final war.

Robert Green, The 33 Strategies of War

Progressive Inhibition

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As John Mazziotta the neurologist at UCLA said, “People don’t realize that the brain is really an inhibition machine.” Mazziotta pulled out a neurology textbook with pictures of a woman kneeling and praying next to a man who was also kneeling and praying. The woman, Mazziotta explained, had suffered brain damage and could no longer inhibit certain actions. She had not the slightest interest in kneeling and praying at that moment, but she could not stop herself from doing what brains want to do, imitate the action they see, like a monkey behind the glass at a zoo, making faces back at you. 

Another thing to remember, Mazziotta said, is that many of the brain’s systems are running all the time. “Think of an airplane,” said Mazziotta. “Most people think that when it lands it has its engines on low and it’s just floating in. But that’s not always so; in landing, an airplane often has to be at full throttle in case it has to react quickly if something happens.” The brain, too he says, is set up to be whirring all the time. Even when we think of it as resting, its neurons are often firing at a low level, ready and waiting, so it can react in time before, for instance, it’s eaten by a bigger, quicker brain.

The brain is working constantly, and one of the tasks it works at is to inhibit itself from a variety of actions. It is striving to resist the urge to raise the coffee cup like the guy across the table, and striving not to do a number of things that might not be in its best interest. As the brain develops- in children and, science is now learning, in teenagers- it is this very inhibition machinery that is being fine-tuned. 

“Development,” says Mazziotta, “is progressive inhibition.”

Barbara Strauch, The Primal Teen

Hurting from Loss

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Love anything that lives—a person, a pet, a plant—and it will die. Trust anybody and you may be hurt; depend on anyone and that one may let you down. The price of cathexis (letting something or someone become important to us) is pain. If someone is determined not to risk pain, then such a person must do without many things: having children, getting married, the ecstasy of sex, the hope of ambition, friendship - all that makes life alive, meaningful and significant.

Move out or grow in any dimension and pain as well as joy will be your reward. A full life will be full of pain. But the only alternative is not to live fully or not to live at all. The attempt to avoid legitimate suffering lies at the root of all emotional illness.

M Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

The Standard

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The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people's ideas get nearer to that real Right than others. 

Or put it this way. If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something-some Real Morality--for them to be true about. 

If the Rule of Decent Behaviour meant simply 'whatever each nation happens to approve,' there would be no sense in saying that any one nation had ever been more correct in its approval than any other; no sense in saying that the world could ever grow morally better or morally worse.

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity