There are two major ways of conceiving of time, or history: linear and cyclical. The Fourth Turning, a thought-provoking book from William Strauss and Neil Howe, suggests that, since the scientific and industrial revolutions, the linear conception has tended to predominate in the West. The logical and rational processes which underlay these revolutions, such as deduction, extrapolation, and inference, are in a way linear and tended to promote this way of thinking about time. According to the authors, however, it is conceited and foolish to fall into the trap of viewing human history through this lens. The patterns of history reveal instead that human society evolves cyclically, alternately passing through stages that recur at more or less regular intervals. Each stage is marked by a radically different ethos, and the boundaries between stages are, accordingly, marked by crises, moments of profound turmoil and upheaval, often wars. In different guises, these stages of nation building, spiritual awakening, social fragmentation, and existential crisis repeat themselves.

In light of this historically revealed insight, it would be naive to extrapolate from the present and imagine the future as flowing from it in a straightforward way. The future will not simply be a more developed stage of the current state of affairs. It can’t be taken for granted that the movements and tendencies underpinning current events, such as China’s reawakening and renaissance, will indefinitely continue to deepen and shape our society. This would be the case under a strictly linear view of history, which might predict a future in which China becomes a global hegemon. Under the cyclical view of time, such a scenario does not necessarily follow because the assumption that present trends will continuously develop is rejected. Instead, the present is situated in the context of a phase, which is temporally limited and, at its conclusion, will be dramatically replaced by a phase of an essentially different character.

In this historiographical study, I’ve found a bit of a cure for my pessimism. I was, and largely still am, the kind of person whose mind often jumps to and lingers on bad scenarios. When I’m traveling for example, I imagine what would happen if I missed my flight and were stranded, forced to buy an outrageously expensive one-way ticket to salvage the rest of my trip. I used to think this was prudence but have come to see it as an unhealthy habit. I wasn’t just turning my mind to these contingencies as things that could, however improbably, happen; I was focusing on them almost exclusively, to the exclusion of the positive outcomes and potentialities.

In an especially cruel mind trick, whenever something went badly, I would take that as being an indication of how things would permanently be from then on. For example, if I had failed to avoid working on the weekend, I would perversely assume that I would have to work every weekend from then on, and I’d just have to cope or quit. I would latch onto a negative experience and extrapolate from it to a horrible future, wholly made up of this experience that was, until then, an aberration. When I reflected on the cycles of history, however, I noticed parallel, if not entirely similar, patterns in my own experience. My life wasn’t one long story of linear development, and so it was just as foolish to perform this kind of extrapolation. The drudgery of uninspired sluggishness will end and be succeeded, suddenly, by a period of building up a new identity. The nostalgically mourned optimism of youth will return in a burst of energy. The clothes you had cast away as being obsolete relics of your past, like that old backpack you’d sown a “skateboarding is not a crime” patch on, will find their way back into your wardrobe.

For me, there is a profound consolation in knowing that the natural order is not for things to keep going in the same direction. The future does not simply fall out of the present, and the past is not confined to the past. There is hope and excitement in periodic renewal, in the junctures that bring about radical shifts in your life.