I’m not in the right headspace to flesh this out completely, but I’ve thought a lot about how out-and-out reactionary currents refer to a mythical great past and how “typical” “moderate” currents also do the same with a mythical “back to normal” that, sure, may have existed in some way, but categorically was not an acceptable state. Or at least the surface appearance of a “normal”.

I’m in Lebanon and we’ve been living through a lot of sudden economic and social changes, and I catch myself yearning for like 2017 when my life savings didn’t lose 99% of its value and I could drive up and down the country to have fun. The reality is that it wasn’t a normal state of affairs, the “good times” were really just us loading debt onto our future selves (not just financial debt). By artificially pretending our currency was worth more, it made the economic crash much much worse when it did happen. These places I would visit aren’t some unfortunate lush destinations designed for me to have fun that I sadly can’t visit anymore from a vague reason, they’re people’s homes unfairly destroyed by war. My enjoyment of them is not the tragedy here.

The “good old days” I look back upon still had me without electricity for hours a day, still had me on 200kbps internet, still had me fight monthly with the local electricity mob, still had me spend multiple periods without running water, still had me perform jobs for faraway companies that paid me less than my foreign coworkers because of my passport. All of these things are unchanged. What do you mean we miss stability? We didn’t have it!

Not sure if what I’m trying to express is getting across, but this moderate “good times” fantasy feels like it has to be by definition an unsustainable state that precludes something breaking and a lot of people materially worse off.