The Rhythm of History
We like to tell ourselves that we live in unprecedented times.
Every crisis arrives draped in the language of uniqueness. Every shock is the one nobody could have seen coming. Every turning point is the moment when “everything changed.” And yet, if you stand still for long enough and listen beneath the noise, a familiar pattern emerges. The instruments are new. The tempo is different. But the melody? We have heard it before.
History is not a straight line marching confidently from ignorance to enlightenment. It is closer to a piece of music: themes introduced, forgotten, and then returned to in a different key. There is a rise, a lull, a crescendo, a long unresolved chord that hums beneath the surface of our lives. What we call “events” are often just the moments when that buried music becomes briefly audible.
We lived through a global pandemic and called it unimaginable, as if the world had not already choked its way through 1918. We spoke about “getting back to normal” as if that phrase itself did not have a history, as if the rush to forget and move on had not been rehearsed already in 1920. We watched markets shudder and break, and still described the shocks as mysterious, as if 1929 had not written an entire manual on boom, denial, and collapse.
The point is not that nothing is new under the sun. Some things are new: our technologies, our weapons, our networks, our capacity to damage or heal at scale. But the way we respond to fear and opportunity—the rush to forget, the hunger for comfort, the certainty that this time we have tamed risk—is eerily familiar. The human psyche does not refresh with each generation. It carries old habits into new worlds.
This is a meditation on that rhythm. Not a historian’s chronology, but a listener’s ear pressed against the wall of the last century, trying to catch recurring motifs. 1918, 1920, 1929: three notes in a larger composition. War and pandemic. The seduction of “normal.” The crash that forces us to hear what we tried to ignore.
Beneath it all sits a simple question: if history has a rhythm, why do we keep dancing as if we cannot hear it?
History as Rhythm, Not Line
We are trained to see history as a timeline: left to right, past to present, with neat labels laid along a straight road. 1918. 1920. 1929. War, recovery, crash. From a distance it looks tidy, almost reassuring. The mess has been flattened into a sequence. The chaos has been tamed into chapters.
But life is not lived on timelines. Life is lived in cycles of mood and memory, of fear and exuberance, of trauma and forgetting. It unfolds more like a piece of music than a spreadsheet. Patterns repeat with small variations. Themes disappear for a while, only to return later in a darker or lighter shade. A phrase you thought was finished returns at an unexpected moment and suddenly makes sense of what came before.
When we say “history repeats itself,” we are usually wrong in the details and right in the structure. The exact combination of events never comes again. No war is identical to the last, no pandemic tracks the previous one precisely, no financial crisis copies its predecessor line for line. Yet the underlying human patterns—how we respond to danger, how we handle success, how we forget the lessons of both—are remarkably consistent. It is less repetition than rhyme.
Think of the rhythm that runs through so many stories of the past century. After a period of restraint or fear, there is often a rush into expansion: spending, building, speculating, celebrating. After devastation, there is a hunger for noise and brightness that can drown out the memory of what hurt. In that expansion, caution slowly becomes unfashionable. Doubt feels like pessimism. Warnings sound like an attack on hope. Then, when the structure finally fails—whether in war, plague, or market collapse—we stand in the ruins and insist that nobody could have known.
This rhythm is not a law of nature. It is a reflection of how human beings, especially in large groups, tend to deal with discomfort. We do not like to stare too long at fragility. We do not enjoy being reminded that our systems rest on assumptions, that our prosperity is contingent, that our certainties are built on sand. After a shock, we promise “never again,” but that promise quietly competes with another desire: never again do we want to feel this vulnerable, this interrupted, this aware of how thin the ice really is.
Every generation believes it is more sophisticated than the one before. Our models are better, our data richer, our tools sharper. We convince ourselves that we have finally domesticated risk, tamed disease, optimized markets, civilized politics. In that confidence, history becomes scenery: a backdrop of sepia images and old catastrophes, suitable for documentaries and anniversaries, but not directly relevant to our sleek and quantified present.
Yet history is not scenery. It is rehearsal footage. It shows us not only what happened, but how we behaved while it was happening: what we noticed, what we dismissed, what we preferred not to know. The years 1918, 1920, and 1929 are not simply dates; they are moments when the rhythm of the twentieth century became abruptly audible. In 1918, the illusion of heroic progress was shattered by industrial-scale slaughter and an invisible virus that cared nothing for borders or flags. In 1920, the world turned toward distraction and normality, eager to bury its grief and its questions beneath speed, spectacle, and consumption. By 1929, the unresolved tensions—debt, speculation, inequality, fragile institutions—had accumulated into a crash that made denial impossible.
If we treat those years as isolated events, we miss the music that connects them. If instead we place them side by side and ask what mood, what memory, what policy, what forgetfulness carried us from one to the next, another picture emerges. We see a pattern of crisis, amnesia, and consequence. We see not only what was done, but what was left undone. We see the price of the stories societies tell themselves in order to keep moving.
At the centre of this rhythm is not some abstract force of history, but the human psyche itself. We are not built to hold unbroken attention on pain. Individually and collectively, we reach a saturation point. After war or pandemic or economic collapse, people want to live again. They want to dance, to spend, to build, to stop thinking about death and debt and fragility. That impulse is understandable; in many ways it is healthy. Life cannot be lived permanently at the edge of catastrophe.
The danger lies not in the desire to live, but in the stories we craft as we turn away from what hurt us. We mutter that the disaster was a freak event, rather than asking which of our choices made it more likely. We tell ourselves that it could never happen again, rather than asking what would be required to prevent it. We assure ourselves that we have learned our lesson, even as we quietly rebuild the same incentives, the same blind spots, the same architectures of risk.
In those small acts of narrative editing, the rhythm continues. The beat does not stop; it simply becomes quieter. The policies we pass, the debts we accept, the inequalities we normalize, the distractions we flood ourselves with, all carry the imprint of what we refuse to remember. And so, when the next shock arrives, we stand in its shadow and call it “unprecedented.” Not because it truly has no precedent, but because we have carefully filed the relevant precedent under “old story, no longer relevant.”
To hear the rhythm of history is not to become cynical and shrug that nothing ever changes. It is to become more honest about what does and does not change. Technologies change. Incentives often do not. Institutions change their names and their branding. Power still seeks opacity and self-preservation. The surface story shifts; the deeper habits—our avoidance of discomfort, our worship of uninterrupted growth, our faith that this time will be different—are stubborn.
With that in mind, it is worth listening more closely to three particular beats: 1918, 1920, and 1929. Not as museum exhibits, but as variations on a theme we are still improvising today.
1918: The First Crescendo
By 1918, the dream of effortless progress that had animated so much of the nineteenth century lay in ruins. Europe was a landscape of trenches and graves. An entire generation had marched off in uniforms and come back, if they came back at all, with missing limbs and haunted eyes. The war that was supposed to be swift and decisive had turned into a grinding machine that chewed through millions of lives for inches of mud.
As the guns began to fall silent, another enemy, quieter and more intimate, took the stage. The influenza pandemic moved through barracks and cities with a speed that stunned doctors and governments. It did not negotiate. It did not respect borders or treaties. It came in waves, often striking the young and healthy hardest, and it travelled along the very routes that war and trade had intensified. The modern world had given itself new ways to connect; the virus simply rode along.
1918 was therefore a double exposure. On one layer, the industrial slaughter of the battlefield. On another, the invisible spread of disease through homes and hospitals and streets. Together they produced not only an immense toll in lives, but a deep fracture in meaning. The language of glory and sacrifice sounded thin against the reality of shell shock and mass graves. The confidence that science and reason were steering humanity toward a better world felt fragile, almost naive, in the face of a virus that seemed to mock human control.
In such a moment, there is an opening. When structures crack, societies can see more clearly what was hidden behind them: the inequalities that sent some to die while others profited, the arrogance that dismissed early warnings, the vulnerabilities built into the very systems that claimed to protect. There is a chance, however brief, to ask foundational questions. What kind of order produced this catastrophe? What would it mean to alter it, rather than merely repair it?
But openings are uncomfortable places. They require sitting with grief and uncertainty. They demand a patience for ambiguity that most political systems struggle to sustain. And so, almost as soon as the war and the worst waves of the pandemic eased, another mood began to gather—a desire, entirely human, to turn the page as quickly as possible.
1920: The Seduction of “Back to Normal”
If 1918 was a shuddering intake of breath, 1920 was the exhale—a long, eager push toward anything that did not smell of trenches or hospitals. The phrase “return to normalcy” floated through politics and public life, and with it came a promise: the nightmare is over, we can go back to the way things were.
But the way things were had led, step by step, to the very horrors people were trying to escape. The debts accumulated during the war, the resentments encoded into treaties, the structural inequalities and fragile financial arrangements that had been temporarily papered over by emergency measures, all remained in place. What changed was not the underlying architecture, but the mood.
Cities roared back to life. In parts of the world, the early 1920s were years of jazz clubs, crowded dance floors, neon lights, speculation, and speed. People craved novelty. New technologies—radio, cinema, automobiles—fed a sense that the future was finally arriving, shiny and unstoppable. Consumption became not just an activity but a kind of therapy, a way to assert that life had triumphed over death. If you could buy, travel, dance, and invest, then surely the darkness had been left behind.
In that atmosphere, forgetting became a social skill. To dwell too long on the war or the pandemic was to risk being labelled morbid, or out of step. Better to speak of opportunity, of growth, of national greatness and personal advancement. The dead were honoured in ceremonies and monuments, but daily life moved quickly past them. The questions that had flickered in the aftermath of 1918—about the wisdom of political leaders, the fragility of global systems, the ethics of profit in wartime—were gradually folded away.
This was not simple malice. For many, turning toward work and pleasure was a necessary survival strategy. You cannot live forever in mourning. Yet when a society translates that understandable desire into policy, when governments and markets join the rush to distraction, forgetting hardens into a kind of collective ideology. Normality becomes not just a condition but a sacred object. Any voice that suggests deeper change is treated as a threat to stability, even if that stability rests on unresolved fault lines.
By 1920, the world had not healed its fractures; it had simply covered them with noise. Financial markets expanded, often on the back of speculative bubbles and easy credit. Political tensions simmered beneath the surface, particularly in countries saddled with reparations or humiliated in defeat. Colonial empires, shaken but not dismantled, continued to extract wealth from populations whose own grievances would later erupt. The mood was buoyant, but the structure was brittle.
The lesson of 1920 is painfully contemporary. When we rush to declare a “return to normal,” we often mean a return to habits that were already dangerous. The very enthusiasm with which we embrace the old patterns can blind us to the fact that those patterns have not been repaired, only resumed. In the music of history, this is the passage where the melody becomes bright and fast, and the audience forgets that the ominous motif heard earlier has not disappeared. It is still there, waiting to re-emerge.
1929: When the Music Crashes
By the late 1920s, the belief that prosperity was permanent had hardened into common sense in many parts of the world. Markets climbed; fortunes were made on paper; credit flowed easily. The logic was seductive: prices had risen, and therefore they would continue to rise. Risk seemed to belong to the past, to the shabby, pre-modern world that the new age of data and industry had supposedly left behind.
This was not simply a story about greedy speculators in smoky rooms. It was a broader psychological climate. Ordinary people, drawn by the promise of quick gains, entered markets they did not fully understand. Newspapers and radio programs amplified the myth of endless growth. Politicians, reluctant to prick the bubble, spoke the language of confidence and stability. To question the frenzy was to sound like an enemy of progress.
Yet beneath the exuberance, the same unresolved tensions that had been present in 1918 and 1920 continued to build. Debts piled up on fragile foundations. Inequalities widened, with many left precarious even as a minority thrived. The global system was tightly coupled, so that a shock in one part of the network could ripple rapidly across borders. These were not secrets; there were voices that warned, analyses that pointed to the fragility. But in a culture saturated with the sound of easy success, such voices were faint and easily ignored.
When the crash came in 1929, it did not arrive as an alien force. It was the moment when the suppressed rhythm finally broke through the surface. Markets fell, and kept falling. Institutions that had seemed solid revealed their weakness. The faith that the future would be a straight extension of the recent past collapsed in a matter of days. The music did not simply stop; it reversed, and all the notes that had been borrowed from tomorrow had to be paid back with interest.
The trauma of 1929 did more than wipe out wealth. It shattered narratives. People who had believed that the system was both rational and benevolent found themselves confronted with a different reality: gains were privatized, losses socialized; optimism had been encouraged when it was profitable, and abandoned when it was no longer convenient. The idea that the crisis was “unimaginable” was, in a narrow sense, false. The signs had been there. What was unimaginable was our willingness to take them seriously while the party was still underway.
Looking back at 1918, 1920, and 1929 together, a pattern becomes hard to deny. A world shaken by war and disease reaches a brink where structural change is possible. That possibility is largely set aside in favour of a comforting normality that leaves the underlying risks intact. Eventually, those risks crystallize into a crisis that feels sudden only because we refused to hear its approach.
The rhythm is not mechanical; it is human. It is the sound of our refusal to stay with discomfort long enough to transform it.
Learning to Hear the Rhythm
What does it mean, then, to learn from the past in a way that is more than slogan? It is easy to say “never again” after a catastrophe, and easier still to forget that vow when the immediate danger recedes. The deeper work of learning is quieter, slower, and far less glamorous.
At its core, it requires a different relationship to memory. Historical memory is not the rote recall of dates and names, the trivia of school exams. It is a form of moral and civic attention. To remember 1918 is not only to acknowledge a war and a pandemic, but to ask how political choices, technological pride, and economic arrangements combined to make such devastation possible. To remember 1920 is to examine our own longing for normality, and to question what we are willing to push back into the shadows in order to feel safe. To remember 1929 is to confront the ways in which collective denial, amplified by institutions, can turn manageable risks into systemic disasters.
The human psyche will always seek some measure of forgetting; that is part of how we survive. The aim is not to abolish that impulse, but to temper it with structures that keep certain lessons alive even when we would prefer not to think about them. Those structures can be institutional—regulations that persist beyond the crisis that inspired them, social safety nets that do not vanish at the first sign of prosperity, mechanisms that make it harder to privatize gains and socialize losses. They can also be cultural: stories, rituals, and narratives that resist the urge to romanticize past eras or sanitize their costs.
On a more intimate level, learning to hear the rhythm of history is a practice of noticing what we are eager to move past. After each collective shock, there is a moment when difficult questions are briefly permitted in public: about inequality, about the purpose of work, about the limits of growth, about who carries the burden when systems fail. Pay attention to which of those questions are quickly declared “divisive” or “unhelpful” once the immediate emergency fades. In that move, you can often glimpse the next echo forming.
None of this guarantees that we will avoid future crises. History’s rhythm is not a puzzle to be solved once and for all. There will always be uncertainty, always be surprises, always be failures and blindsides. The goal is more modest and more radical at once: to reduce the portion of our suffering that comes not from the unknown, but from what we already knew and chose to forget.
To live with that awareness is uncomfortable. It requires a kind of double vision, holding gratitude for periods of calm without mistaking them for permanence, enjoying prosperity without treating it as entitlement, embracing innovation without assuming it has abolished vulnerability. It asks us to resist the narcotic pull of “unprecedented” as an excuse for ignorance, and instead to ask, each time the word appears: what does this remind us of, and why did we put that memory away?
The rhythm of history will continue, with or without our consent. Crises will come and go. Moments of joy and flourishing will follow periods of fear. The question is whether we insist on treating each cycle as a standalone episode, or whether we develop the humility to hear in today’s events the echo of earlier notes.
We are not condemned to dance blindly. We can train our ears. We can honour the dead without burying their lessons alongside them. We can build institutions and stories that carry forward the uncomfortable truths we would rather ignore. And perhaps, if enough of us learn to listen, the next time the music begins to swell in a familiar and dangerous way, we will recognize the motif in time—not to escape the rhythm entirely, but to move within it with a little more care.
