What We Think About
I found this a few months ago but forgot about it until I saw the bookmark. Each year, this essay collection posts 24 essays from 24 writers, each featuring something the writer thought about a lot that year. Current essays (from this last year) include loneliness, caregiving, and money. Each essay is personal, capturing an individual’s thoughts vs. trying to define the year.
But the period also seeps into the essay choices, like universal basic income features or how to chit-chat on video calls in 2020.
The collection is growing forward, so it will be fascinating for people hundreds of years from now. What a gift for the future.
Could you imagine if you could read the essays from the 1440s and see what people were thinking about during the invention of the printing press? Were they thinking about how movable type would change the world, or were their thoughts occupied by… mince pies? What else were people thinking about during major world events? Maybe what we thought people were thinking about wasn’t on their minds at all.
1 comment
Oooh, those essays sound fabulous! I’ve read one (you guessed it, the childless one), and I’m looking forward to reading the others. I was at university in the early 80s, and me and my friends remember being quite afraid of the USSR, of changes there, of the prospect of nuclear war. I also remember feeling a sense of doom when I heard (I can’t remember if it was the 70s or 80s) that the population of the planet had reached four billion. Young people today have no idea that that worried us, and they think we are callous now! I’d absolutely love to know what people worried about in the 1440s. It might surprise us, and not be so different from our worries today.
Personally, I always find it fascinating to go back and see what I was blogging about ten years ago (or even two years ago). Or to read old posts of favourite bloggers. I’m sure you do too. Time passes, we change, and we don’t always recognise how.