Welcome back to the Breaking Time. If you're reading this for the first time, I'm glad you're here. If you're returning, thank you for your abundant patience during the very long period of hibernation.
The Breaking Time is a shorthand for this era. I chose it because it seems to describe everything up for grabs and everyone trying to roll with the punches as best they can. We live in turbulence.
It is a simple name for the complicated moment in history when the old answers don't work but the new ones are still unwritten.
A Breaking Time is also opportunity, shaking up old patterns and letting in the new. The impossible becomes merely difficult, and the difficult can become reality. Good things break, but so do barriers.
Still, history is filled with change. What's different today?
There's the sheer scale, with a connected world able to mix cultures and knowledge at unprecedented speed. There is also the breadth of current turmoil: the past half-century has seen nearly every facet of life — from technology to family to politics — altered.
But above all, what's unique is that this Breaking Time is happening now.
We can learn from past upheaval. We must live in this one.
This is a space where we (myself and my fellow writers) will try our best to make some sense of our fractured time. If we are lucky, we might even salvage some useful ideas. We will try to avoid easy answers. I doubt I am the only one who feels the future deserves better than recycled "alternatives" that were dubious three decades ago.
Instead, the Breaking Time believes in hybrids, mash-ups, impurities, contradictions, organization, pragmatists, makers, teachers, workers, fighters. We admire "influenced by" far more than “follower of.” We trust the hard question and the ignored truth.
There is no magic bullet. There is no cavalry coming.
There's just us, and our world.
It will be a hell of a ride.
Logo designed by David Gray
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