“But I do remember a bit of life before the twenty-first century, and I do remember the sensation, especially after 9/11, that time had stopped feeling like time. Society collectively lost the sense that an era feels like an era - they forgot the way it felt when time and emotions and culture were particular to one spot in time, the way I suppose decades felt in the twentieth century. And lives stopped feeling like lives - or at least, people began talking about not having a life. What could that mean? Information overload triggered a crisis in the way people saw their lives. It sped up the way we locate, cross-reference, and focus the questions that define our essence, our roles - our stories. The crux seems to be that our lives stopped being stories. And if we are no longer to have lives that are stories, what will our lives have become? Yet seeing one’s life as a story seems like nostalgic residue from an era when energy was cheap and the notion of the super-special, ultra-important individual with blogs and Google hits and a killer resume was a conceit the planet was still able to materially support. In the New Normal, we need to strip ourselves of notions of individual importance. Something new is arising that has neither interest in nor pity for souls trapped in twentieth-century solipsism. Non-linear stories? Multiple endings? No loading times? It’s called life on earth. Life need not be a story, but it does need to be an adventure.”

- Douglas Coupland, “Player One: What is to Become of Us”

“There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest.”

- Julian Barnes, “The Sense of an Ending”