Going online and rolling through articles, journals, and Substack essays feels to me the way others describe hiking. It’s exhilarating. Inspiring. Occasionally terrifying — steep drops, sudden exposure, vertigo-inducing rabbit holes. But so endlessly, irresistibly interesting. I come home exhausted and never regret the trip.
I know many people I love and respect would prescribe an actual hike in the actual woods over my particular brand of armchair adventuring. They’d say the forest floor is far more salubrious than the internet, and they’d be right. But here I am.
It was on one of these recent expeditions that I stumbled across Yuval Harari in a Facebook reel — appropriate, somehow, that one of the most searching thinkers about the digital age should reach me through the most algorithmically mundane of digital corridors. Harari is an Israeli historian and public intellectual best known for Sapiens, that sweeping, audacious attempt to narrate the entire human story in a single volume. He thinks in centuries and civilizations. Some find this thrilling; others find it reductive. I find it indispensable.
Whenever Harari speaks, I lean in. He has a rare gift for identifying the megatrends hiding in plain sight — the tectonic shifts we’re standing on but rarely see. And he said something in this reel that stopped me cold:
For the first time in history, we have no idea what the world will look like in ten years. Processes that used to take centuries are now happening within decades — maybe even years. For most of history, the big changes took longer than a human lifespan, so people had the impression that things were more or less as they always were. Grandparents and grandchildren inhabited essentially the same world. But now the acceleration is so extreme that even people in their thirties and forties feel their children are living in a fundamentally different reality.
I feel this. Viscerally. Regularly. I’ll share a memory — a film, a cultural reference, some formative moment — with my staff, and I watch them exchange that quick, polite, baffled glance: What is he talking about? We are not merely different generations. We’re wearing different lenses entirely, looking at different landscapes and calling them the same world.
And yet — I’m not sure Harari’s “first time in history” claim survives scrutiny. Did Americans in 1942, with the world burning on two fronts, have any reliable picture of what 1952 would look like? Did Jews in the newly declared State of Israel in 1950 — exhausted, surrounded, still counting their dead from the Holocaust — dare to imagine what lay ahead? Did Japan, in the rubble of August 1945, have any conception of what it was about to become? History is full of moments when the fog was total, when the future felt not merely uncertain but actively hostile to prediction.
What may be different now is not that we lack foresight — we’ve always lacked foresight — but that we know we lack it, and that we’re drowning in real-time information that somehow makes the uncertainty worse rather than better. The internet doesn’t illuminate the future; it amplifies the noise of the present until the noise becomes its own kind of blindness.
This is, I think, what I’m grappling with — not just the pace of change, but the sheer messiness of trying to hold multiple truths at once. That a war is both necessary and devastating. That antisemitism is real and so is Palestinian suffering. That technology is miraculous and corrosive. That I am both exhausted by the news and unable to stop consuming it. Acknowledging that complexity, sitting with it rather than collapsing it into a single clean narrative — this is hard. Genuinely hard. But it strikes me as healthier, in the long run, than picking one plotline and riding it into the ground.
Still. The miasma of the Iran–Israel–America–Lebanon tangle is something else entirely. It’s not an intellectual puzzle; it’s a blanket of harsh nettles. Clarity feels not just elusive but almost obscene to wish for, given the relentless toll on innocent lives. No one — not the analysts, not the generals, not the leaders who ignited this — knows what comes next.
And so I wonder, honestly, whether the forest trail might offer more than the feed. Not answers. Just a little peace. A little silence. Some perspective that doesn’t come in a reel.
Maybe the hikers are onto something.
Before Shabbat 