My grandparents lived in a world that, despite upheavals, offered strong continuities. A person could work the same job for decades, remain in one community, and pass through life with institutions and traditions that projected durability. Technology advanced—radio in the 1920s, television in the 1950s—but at a pace that felt gradual compared to today’s compressed leaps.

This produced an illusion of permanence. Not because people were unaware of change—wars, depressions, and political turmoil made impermanence inescapable—but because daily structures provided buffers. Continuity of work, rootedness of place, and resilience of institutions created the impression that life rested on stable ground.

Philosophers had long warned otherwise. Nietzsche stripped away the metaphysical comfort of fixed truths, Heidegger analyzed how routines and roles conceal groundlessness, and Nishitani reframed nothingness as a horizon where categories dissolve. Despite their different approaches, all three pointed to the fragility of what we treat as permanent.

How Stability Worked

The key is not that change was absent, but that social stability sustained the illusion of permanence. Several mechanisms reinforced it:

• Institutional continuity: unions, churches, civic associations, and extended families gave lives a durable frame. In the U.S., union membership peaked at about 35% of workers in the mid-1950s but fell below 10% by 2024 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025).
• Cultural narratives: ideas of national progress, religious tradition, and inherited roles suggested long-term certainty.
• Geographic rootedness: many people lived and died in one place, among the same neighbors.

Together, these factors allowed people to integrate disruption without abandoning the belief that the world’s structures were fundamentally secure.

The Acceleration and Its Consequences

By the late 20th century, those stabilizing mechanisms weakened. The tempo of change compressed—radio to smartphones to AI within decades. Careers became less predictable. Institutions once seen as immovable lost solidity and credibility, disrupted by technological, cultural, and political shifts. Even the frameworks used to interpret society fractured into competing narratives.

The “golden age of stability” did not end in mere disruption. What collapsed was our ability to sustain the illusion of permanence. With institutional buffers eroded and cultural anchors frayed, impermanence became harder to keep at bay in daily experience.

The Question

If permanence was always an illusion sustained by social conditions, how should we live now that those conditions no longer hold? How do we navigate a world where even the frameworks for interpreting reality are in flux?

One answer—though normative, not inevitable—may lie in recovering capacities modern life has marginalized: improvisation, play, and new ways of inhabiting uncertainty. These capacities matter because they help individuals and communities function when predictability cannot be assumed. They support adaptability, resilience, and presence in a world without stable ground.

But that is for the next post.

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