On change and uncertainty in the modern world
A new year for a world in transition and beyond
Every year, at its close, enough people tend to look back at what the year past was like. In the modern world, enough of this is publicly done. You see people talking of the successes, of failures, of joy, of pain, and of every little infinity in between those that combined, comprise the human spirit. At the end of 2025, however, there was something slightly different that I thought I noticed. While my perspective is undoubtedly biased by who I know and what they are, I think it’s not too presumptuous to claim that the past year was one where many people saw change and the uncertainty that change brings.
Curiously, I don’t necessarily recall the same being said during the year. During the year, I recall closer to the usual. Some would be happy with their lot in life, others less so. Yet in retrospect, even those that felt the year positively, still seemed to look back at it as one of change. On the surface, this makes sense. We’ve had at least three wars in play across the year with at least three nuclear powers directly involved. We’ve had a trade war that took the price of global trade to its highest in a century. We’ve had the snowballing effect of LLMs onto society, both positive and negative. From a bird’s eye view, there is a lot going on, and a lot of big things changing.
What’s happening under the radar though? I think to answer this, you have to look at why things are the way they are at any time. The way the world works at any given time, the values at play, the institutions that uphold all of this, and even the very types of thoughts that we have are all things, that I would argue as forming the “structure” of the world. Different elements are connected to each other in different ways, these connections affect other connections, all this affects elements back again, and in all combinations create a dynamic, moving, and complex creature. The extremely non-linear way that this works to create a functional creature, I think, is hard for anyone to properly note down. We might hold some basic ideas, and some might hold even some advanced theories, but in the end, no human mind (nor even a computer model - but this is a topic for another day) can fully understand every single relationship at play and how they all combine to form the world as we know it.
Sometimes, this creature behaves. The larger, more visible connections tend to dominate the behaviour of the whole, and there are enough spaces inside to hide all the little things that don’t fit in so that we don’t see it overall. The world makes sense at these times. There is a certain order to things, there are certain “rules” that seem to govern how society works, and you can understand when a small part changes, why it did so and what takes it away. Think of it like an ice cube almost - it’s well-ordered, and if you move one part of the ice cube, the rest of the cube, being frozen together, follows it. You know it can melt, you know when it does so, and you know how to make a cube again.
In many ways, I think the world has been behaving like this for a while. At least since the end of the world wars, there’s been some overall “grammar” to how the world works. Of course, it has changed still, but the idea of an American-led world - sometimes with a counterpole, sometimes without - that works on increasing economic integration and increasing social interconnectivity, and every other aspect that derives from this, is how I broadly understand the world to have been working. The past tense is intentional here. I think this world is changing now, and potentially other worlds that have lasted for even longer too.
Regardless of the specifics of this view - another story for later, this creates a very different story in how we understand the world. The usual stories play out in the day-to-day of our lives. We live in all the ways that we can live in the moment, but the longer arc of our lives looks somewhat different and critically, uncertain and unexplainable. Things don’t work the way they do anymore. The ice cube that we analogized the world to, has fully melted - and we don’t know how water works. We are living through history, in other words, but unlike most people who only see it well past, we might actually be starting to see it in the present as well.
The new year looks like it will keep most of the changes of the old year going through. Of course, if the way the world works is changing, then perhaps even this isn’t certain and the changes themselves can change. I am reminded of the moment of ludicriousness when Korean chicken stocks rose after Jensen Huang ate at a chicken restaurant. That is not a sign of a “rational” world functioning according to “rational” principles. More accurately, that is not the way the world is “supposed” to work. But nevertheless, it did behave that way. That kind of change, and changing change, looks increasingly like what 2026 will have to be about.
From one perspective, that can sound incredibly dystopian and pessimistic. The world is breaking and we might have to face all the pain it brings. Yet I don’t mean it in that sense. I mean it rather from the perspective, that thinking about whether change is possible and knowing that it could be, prepares us to engage with that better. Our abilities to engage with both ourselves, those around us, and the wider world would probably be better honed once we’re open to the world not functioning under the same rules as before. If big change, especially of the systemic global sense is likely, it isn’t “business as usual”. Yes, sometimes the very worst of humanity can come about during such times. But it is also at times of change, that we also get to see the very best of what it means to be human - a pocket of wonder that insists upon itself.