THE 2010s HAVE BROKEN OUR SENSE OF TIME: That’s the headline of a recent BuzzFeed article. James Lileks disagrees:

Without knowing history, facts, names, events, trends, concerns, panics, morals, tropes, and all the other shared threads of an era, you can’t understand what produced the thing you’re now claiming to have the right to reuse. If you can’t make sense of your current era, it’s because you don’t have the ability to make sense of any era, and hence don’t know how this all works in the flow of the last 100 years of the culture.

5. Most young generations have been cheerfully unconcerned with what came before, for the most part, because to be young is to be certain your time is the most important evah. But previous generations had time to sift and judge the products of their own time, because the pace of innovation and information was much mroe leisurely. Today everyone faces a firehose of content from waking to sleeping, if they’re Very Online, and mistakes their ability not to drown with understanding where the water comes from, and why, and what it all means. It’s like surviving waterboarding and concluding you’re amphibious.

6. And so on, and so on, unto the grave, etc.

Read the whole thing.