Future Nostalgia

Isn’t this a freaky vibe?

You’ve probably seen these before but do you know what they are? Do you know what the mask signifies?

They’re plague doctors. Doctors wore this mask, with a bird like beak, to distance and protect themselves from being infected. This approach was based on the ‘Miasma Theory’ of diseases, which held that diseases were caused by ‘miasma’, a form of bad air.

Quick history lesson:
The history of the the plague is a little convoluted because there were quite a few. The bubonic plague, known as the ‘Black Death’, started in 1346, and lasted 7 years until 1353. In that time, somewhere between 75 million and 200 million people died.

Following that, there was, most notably, the Italian Plague (1629–1631), the Plague of Naples (1655–1658), the Great Plague of London (1665–1666), the Great Plague of Vienna (1678–1679), the Great Plague of Marseille (1720–1722), the Russian Flu (1889–1890), and the Spanish Flu (1920–1922).

During the first bubonic plague, people in Europe used religion to make sense of the disease and fight it. Without the scientific method or technology, you have to wonder how long things had to unfold for that to change.

In came plague doctors. The first recorded instance of them was in the early 1600s, as it took years for the Miasma Theory of diseases to become the predominant belief. But they were still wrong; they believed the disease was in the air, when in fact, the plague was transmitted through a bacterium carried by flea bites on rats. Plague doctors actually filled the beaks with special herbs to ward off evil smells in the air.

What’s interesting is that this was mostly common to Europe, where Christianity was dominant. In the east, Islamic Scholars as far back as 10th century AD proposed basic forms of germ theory. And, in fact, vaccines date back to 1000 AD, in India. (You can learn more here, just scroll down to the 7th paragraph.) It took almost 1000 years for their practices to reach the western world. Thank god, today we have databases and the internet.

By the 1880s, Germ Theory replaced ‘Miasma’ theory, and bird masks were abandoned. What’s interesting is that these seem like completely separate times in history, but in a sense, they’re not. 1600s Europe is not much different than 1700s or 1800s Europe.

Imagine your doctor, a sinister gothic bird man, is the last thing you saw before dying. It’s interesting to think because it wasn’t that long ago.

The world the average person grew up in, back then, was very similar to the world of their parents, grand parents, and great grand parents. They were all subject to a similar quality of life.

The point I’m getting at is how technology is synthetically accelerating ‘the times’. Technology doesn’t just change technology, it changes culture, paradigms of thought, and quality of life.

10 years ago, the world 50 years ago looked completely different. Today, the world 25 years ago looked different. In 10 years, it’ll be completely different again. If all these markets are any clue, we’ll all be driving electric cars, using electric hovercraft ubers, receiving amazon packages from drones, living in a virtual reality house designed by beeplecrap.

The period of ‘plague doctors’ spanned hundreds of years, and several generations long in history. Contrast that with today — COVID just turned 1 year old, and reopening phases are already being planned. All the shit that happened, or could have happened, was condensed into 1 year, thanks to technology.

This is my point: these days, a year can feel like a lifetime. If that’s true, then our lifetime will be long enough to feel like several lifetimes…

Imagine someone you haven’t spoken to in a year — how many people have you met online since? Which relationships are you sacrificing to nurture or maintain new ones?

Imagine a hobby you haven’t picked up in a year, or put off for a year — how many new ones caught your interest since?

What about humour? What about pronouns? What about work culture? How much has that changed in the last 5 years alone?

Do you feel like a completely different person since last year? Does life feel completely different?

When you wonder why so many people in the world today are the way that they are, remember that it was the same humans 200 years that filled wore bird masks and filled them with herbs.

I don’t have much of a conclusion here. Just think about how quickly life around you is accelerating.

To quote Ferris Bhueller: “Life moves pretty fast, if you don’t stop to look around once in a while, you could miss it.”