Where is your safe space?

The past is at least resolved. The present, annoyingly, is not

(Screenshot of my YouTube homepage)

I am what the French call un gros utilisateur of YouTube. This is made possible by a rare, although probably not unique, confluence of personal circumstances:

1. I have a lot of time on my hands

2. I have a premium subscription¹ — a 33rd birthday present that I now fund out of pocket, like a puppy or jet ski

3. My appetite for content is functionally insatiable²

4. I have, as previously discussed, stopped reading the news, by which I really mean severely restricting time spent on microblogging sites such as (then) Twitter or more recently Bluesky, where breaking news, think tank reports and dad jokes are served up on a platter

What am I actually watching, you may or may not be wondering? Like roughly 70% of YouTube videos, it is whatever the algorithm serves up. Full-length Arsenal matches from the mid- to late-1990s, a documentary series on the collisions in the early Solar System, Thames Television (ask your granddad) panel discussions on the Labour Party and Militant — featuring a youthful Michael Meacher who still somehow looks 77 years old.

The loose thread that connects these seemingly disparate subjects is time. Each operates joyously independently of the world as it exists today. (Though, whatever you think of your lot in life in 2026, you really wouldn’t want to live on Earth a few billion years ago, what with the violent asteroid bombardments, molten lakes for a surface and so on.)

And at their best, these videos can send me into a fugue-like state.

The past is a closed system

The challenges we face today are certainly significant: climate change, geopolitical instability, terrorism, technological disruption. Little wonder many of us feel anxious. I can’t say whether they are greater than those encountered by previous generations, who fought the Cold War, Nazi Germany and sabre-toothed cats. The difference, of course, is the tense.

When my mother first recounted how, in her Long Island high school, she and her classmates would practice hiding under their desks in the event of a Soviet nuclear strike, I broke out in laughter. Not only at the naivety of believing a wooden desk would offer protection from a radioactive blast, but at the idea it could happen at all. We know now there was no nuclear strike. The USSR collapsed! Except, of course, she couldn’t have known that in the 1960s. Even the CIA seemed frequently surprised by events.

The past may not exactly be resolved. For instance, we frequently disagree on its lessons, sometimes whether it even happened at all. But we can know with some certainty that the past is, well, past³. And it is simply much more difficult to feel anxious about something when we know how it ends. That is what makes the present uniquely capable of generating such dread.

Walled gardens