The Threshold

(Yesterday) For most of human history, there was not enough of anything. Not enough food, not enough light after dark, not enough warmth, not enough to read, not enough ways to reach one another. Life was shaped, from edge to edge, by scarcity and by natural limits. The shop shut. The night fell. The letter took three days. You were, for long stretches, simply out of reach.

And then, somewhere around the closing years of the last century-I will suggest around 1989, though the argument of exactly when is an interesting one-the great tap was turned fully on. Abundance arrived and suddenly there was too much of everything: too much choice in the supermarket aisle, too many films at the rental shop, too many cheap flights, too many channels, too many messages, too much access, too much always. The old natural limits, the ones that had shaped every life before ours, quietly dissolved.

We are the first people to live on the far side of that threshold. And I will argue that we are discovering, slowly, that the far side is not the paradise it looked like. It turns out a human being is not built for infinity. We were built for proportion.