There's a scene in the first episode of Twenty-Five Twenty-One, my second favorite Korean show, that I often come back to. The year is 1998, and the financial crisis that gutted half of Asia has reached a high school where a sixteen-year-old fencer named Na Hee-do is being told there's no longer money for a fencing team. She's upset. How could you crush our dreams like this? she asks her coach. He is not a cruel man; he might lose his own job. I didn't crush your dreams, he tells her. The Times did.
His line always felt like a small act of disappearing. A coach hands a student a decision that people made and lays it at the feet of something with no body and no name, as if the nineteen-nineties had walked into the gym and folded up the team itself. And we often talk this way: "a person is a product of their time", or "you can't fight the times". We turn the era into a current, something that picks people up and sets them down where they never chose to go.
It's a comforting way to talk, and a quietly disabling one, because it settles in advance how much of your life you think is yours. If the times are a current and you are a leaf, there's not much to do but float.
I wonder, what is the current actually made of?
Watch a flock of starlings turn over a field at dusk and you'll look, helplessly, for the one in charge. You won't find one. Each bird is only tracking its nearest neighbors and following a couple of simple rules about distance, and the huge, rolling, almost liquid shape overhead is just what those thousands of tiny adjustments add up to from far away. The shape is real. Nobody made it. It looks like a single intention because you can see the shape and not the rules, because from inside the flock, no bird can watch another bird decide.
The times are like a flock, and what we feel as one enormous directed force is the sum of a staggering number of small things—purchases, votes, refusals, a coach running his budget and landing on a number—added up by a process none of us stands far enough back to see. From inside your one life you notice your own small motions and a few around you; the pattern they make is invisible to you as a pattern, so when you finally see the result it seems to come from somewhere above you. We read the order and supply an author, because order without an author is a hard thing to hold in our mind.
That's why the era seems like an agent. Why it seems to have a will, a fixed direction, a mood you could argue with if it would only hold still, comes down to something quieter about people: we don't revise our deepest assumptions very often. Plenty of people change in startling ways late in life, but those are the cases we remark on precisely because they're uncommon; for the most part, the frame we build the world with in our late teens and twenties is the frame we keep. A population that mostly keeps its frame has enormous inertia. It moves slowly, and it moves more or less together. From the inside, that inertia is hard to tell from intent. The current runs one direction not because it wants to, but because most of the water has set.
This is the inverse of Hegel's cunning of reason, that the age was a real spirit, a Geist pursuing its own ends through the very people who imagined they were free. Hegel captured the phantom feeling of the times perfectly; he just gave it an author. There is no author above, only a great many of us below, set into roughly the same shape, mistaking our own collective stiffness for the hand of something larger.
If almost everyone is set in this way, how does anything ever move?
It helps, here, to separate two kinds of force. The big, slow ones like money and geography set the boundaries of what can happen at all. The small, fast ones like a vote or a coach's budget line decide which of the possible things actually does. The era is the first kind, and we keep mistaking it for fate, because the second kind, our own, is the only kind we can feel ourselves exert.
Weather is the cleanest picture of how the two fit together. You cannot say whether it will rain three Tuesdays from now; the smallest difference today, the proverbial butterfly's wing, swamps any forecast. But the weather never does just anything. It stays caged inside a shape: the seasons, a climate, there is a range it cannot leave. Mathematicians call this shape a strange attractor, a system wild and unrepeatable in its details but trapped inside a form it can't escape. The era is a strange attractor made of people. You can't predict the path, but you can sometimes name the cage.
Most of the time the cage simply holds, and your push does nothing, because the system is built to absorb you. But a shape like this has seams, points where it sits balanced between two forms, where the smallest difference sends everything down one branch instead of the other. Physicists call such a point a bifurcation; the moment it could have gone either way.
Think of the meeting where everyone privately hates the plan and no one says so, each held quiet by the quiet of the others. One person says the plain unpopular thing, gives the next person cover, and the third. Social scientists look at these moments and talk about hidden thresholds, the invisible number of people we need to see act before we feel safe acting ourselves. When those thresholds line up, a room that couldn't be moved tips in under a minute. The room wasn't persuaded; it was a hair from going, and the single voice was the push. The voice mattered enormously, and only because of when and where it happened to be standing.
This phenonenon scales to much larger contexts. The political scientist Timur Kuran spent years on why revolutions blindside even the people inside them, and his answer is the silent meeting grown to the size of a nation: we hide what we want when wanting it looks lonely, and each pleasant, lying face becomes one more reason for the next to keep lying, until a whole country is propping up a government almost no one privately supports. The regime looks like granite. It is closer to a held breath, and some small thing, like a refused seat, lets one person guess the others have been pretending too, and the breath goes out all at once.
Kuran's sharper point is that these collapses are impossible to see coming and impossible, afterward, to see as anything but fated. In foresight, nothing; in hindsight, destiny. The Bastille, the Wall, each looks inevitable now precisely because it happened, because the fall exposed all the hidden wanting the silence had kept invisible. The coach's sentence—the Times did it—is the same trick of the eye, run on a smaller grief. It is what the inevitable always says about itself, after.
And the proof that it isn't fate is that you can sometimes run the thing twice. In March of 1955, a Montgomery teenager named Claudette Colvin refused to give up her bus seat and was dragged off it; the city did not move. Nine months later Rosa Parks did the same thing, and a year-long boycott, and its ricocheting consequences, broke segregation on the buses. We like to tell this as the day a tired woman happened to sit, but Parks was no accident—she had been an organizer for over a decade, and had mentored Colvin herself. Their acts were the same. What differed was the season: which thresholds had crept into place, who was ready to follow, whether the room was finally a hair from going. Same push, same wall. One bounced; one tipped. Neither could have known, standing there, which system state she was in.
Systems can suddenly tip, but they can be incredibly hard to move in the first place. Ada Palmer, a historian at the University of Chicago stages a mock Renaissance papal election every year to illustrates this. Year after year, she observes the bribes and factions reshuffle while the same kind of man keeps winning, worldly and powerful, while the war behind him is never twice the same: everyone scrambling to cut channels in the dirt, not one of them commanding the flood, but each small groove altering the specific path the water takes.
Did the coach lie to Na Hee-do?
No, I think he was right. The Times did crush the dream. The money was gone; a person who thinks enough grit can overrule a continental collapse is foolish, and waving the whole thing away is rather naïve. But he was also wrong in a way he couldn't see, because the times that crushed the team are made of ten thousand decisions exactly like the one he was making as he spoke.
He was a starling, calling the flock an act of God. And his real mistake wasn't philosophical but practical: the times did it is a phrase that closes the file. That is the quiet cost of the phrase: not that it's false—it's usually true enough—but that saying it hands off a portion of your own responsibility to something with no hands to take it, and tells you to stop looking exactly one move before the move that was still yours to make.
Still, we'll keep saying it. Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that much of our philosophical confusion comes from being bewitched by our own grammar. Our language is built on subjects and verbs; hand it the word 'crushed' and it instinctively goes looking for a noun to commit the act. The Times steps obligingly into the role of the monster. This grammatical trick serves a comforting psychological purpose: to make loss survivable. You can't be angry at an aggregate, or hold a vigil for a statistical tendency.
The coach reached for the only thing that would let a sixteen-year-old lay down her sword without its being his fault, or hers. It's the same story the immigrant parent tells, working the second job, certain she can change nothing herself and that only her children can. And that parent, times a few million parents, is the era, turning. They are the water, sure to the end that they are merely being carried by it.
But Na Hee-do did not float. Told there was no team, she did the thing her former coach had stopped imagining was possible: she found another school that still had a program, talked her way onto its squad, and kept at it until she made the national team. This wasn't just grit beating circumstance. She got through because a door still happened to be open, in a year when the same crisis was shutting them everywhere; had that team folded too, no will on earth would have conjured a fencing strip out of the air. What she refused was to treat the first closed door as the last word, to stop looking the moment someone named the times and shut the file.
Whether you can do what she did depends entirely on the state of the thing you're standing in. People love to talk about history and the future as chess: a board to be read and a forced endgame a sharp enough mind could anticipate.
But the era is not a chessboard, because it never plays the same game twice. Even if you can make out, roughly, the boundaries of what your moment will allow, inside those boundaries, the right move, at the right moment, when the whole thing happens to be balanced on a seam, can tip it in a direction no one could have predicted, least of all the person who pushed.
So you are not the leaf, and you are not the grandmaster either. You are a drop of the water, and you cannot tell from where you stand whether you are in the solid middle, where the system swallows whatever you do, or out on a seam, where a single push picks the branch. Some walls are real, but which wall is real and which only looks it is invisible from inside the current. You are always making the same wager in the same fog: stop, or test it.
That is what makes giving up different from every other mistake. Push on a wall that turns out to be solid and you've lost some effort; you can still turn and look for the door. But decide in advance that there is no door—hand your part to the times and close the file—and you forfeit a chance you were never in a position to rule out. The times can shut a door, but it cannot make you stop looking for the one still open.
This was a fun one to write, that exchange in Twenty-Five Twenty-One has stuck with me and I kept coming back to it as I was reading other essays and books in history, complex systems research, etc. In a way, all this wisdom is captured nicely in Galaxy Quest: never give up, never surrender!