What did 2025 mean, and why did it happen the way it did? Understanding the past is always a balancing act: what was inevitable and what was unlikely? English religious history has been driven by all kinds of complex sociological and intellectual factors, but if King Henry VIII had a son earlier, England might not have become a Protestant nation. World War I Germany was outmatched economically by its foes for deep historical reasons, but British Admiral John Jellicoe could have lost that war anyway with a single bad decision. For want of a nail, the horse was lost, etc.

We have all spent the year telling– or perhaps avoiding– stories about the world and our place in it. Human beings make sense through narrative. This is true on the most profound personal levels: this is what that breakup meant, this is why I am working this job. It hurts when we can’t make sense of things this way. We need narratives as communities and even nations too. Financial markets are driven by narratives. So are elections. Business decisions. War and peace. History if nothing else is the discipline of narrating community stories, which is why historians have arguments like this all the time.

The 2020s have, I think, been an era of narrative breakdown; of course I would say that, as narratives often only coalesce after the fact. But the inaugural event of the decade was a pandemic, and viruses obliterate stories. Disease does not care who you are. While the rich can afford better healthcare, and the already healthy might survive better than others, these weigh the dice– they do not let you escape them. Anti-vax / COVID denial sentiment is pathetic clinging to stories over reality: as I said about RFK Jr. a few months ago, the “Make America Healthy Again” project is a false promise of control over life and death.

The rest of us are not immune to this kind of motivated narration. Opponents of the current President have spent years disputing whether he was a fluke breach from existing norms (convenient to believe if you’d like America to return roughly to where it was) or the obvious result of long-term trends in the Republican party and American racism (useful as an argument if you want dramatic change). The truth, of course, is both. You can easily narrate the current tariff regime as a backlash against the previous global trade regime– we could start telling this story with NAFTA in the 90s, talk about the bipartisan embrace of global trade, throw in a few shuttered factories, and then present the present as a mistaken but unsurprising endpoint.

But if a few thousand people in key states had voted differently in 2016, or if Joe Biden had decided not to run again earlier, or anyone particularly important (take your pick) had fallen ill, or if Attorney General Merrick Garland had decided to do his job, we would probably be telling different stories. In another only slightly different world, we’d be arguing over whether President Hillary Clinton’s victory is the successful endpoint of 90s-00s liberalism. Anti-vax sentiment in 2018 would have been the same regardless of COVID’s emergence in 2019, but the way we understand it and tell stories about our country is not. A few thousand voters in swing states, a virus emerging in the wilderness, and the vicissitudes of heart disease or cancer have the power not only to change the future, but the past. 

This is as unfortunate as it is necessary. Swing voters in Pennsylvania are a small slice of the world: it would be descriptively inaccurate to reinterpret the entirety of the past just because of one tight election. The ongoing genocide in Gaza and the invasion of Ukraine certainly make the character of the Israeli and Russian states respectively more obvious, but the former nation was a repressive ethnostate and the latter regime an oligarchic kleptocracy well before either of these events, and any clear-eyed observer should have been able to see that. 

At the same time, we cannot not narrate the past for the present: if major upheavals like these did not change our stories, we would not have narratives necessary for us to process the present and move into the future. Yet bending them too much to our narrow present or immediate needs risks taking us away from reality. There is a reason time travel would not put historians out of a job: living in a period does not mean understanding it.

There is no perfectly accurate story. I don’t mean that nihilistically; I don’t think all knowledge is power and that history is just a war of lies against lies, or I’d be in another line of work. There are plenty of inaccurate narratives we can rule out. But unless an all-powerful deity deigns to tell us (and even then I’d quibble), I don’t know how we could ever perfectly measure out how likely a particular event is. Nor would that necessary be all that meaningful– whether the election of Donald Trump was a 10% event or a 20% event, it happened.

Meaning is something we make, not something we find. We can make that task easier by being honest and humble with ourselves. If you catch yourself seeing a new event and going aha, I was right all along, re-examine your thoughts– especially if you do it often. Be honest with yourself about what you want to be true and why before you determine what you think is true.

My own aspiration for 2026 is simply not to become a prisoner of my own narrative this year– personally or world-historically. There will be things that happen that do not make sense; some of them will reveal truths about the past, but others will be flukes that obscure what has come before. Some we should be seeing now, and some we couldn’t have. Sometimes we won’t know which is which. Some will take us hundreds of years to properly understand, and will always demand repeated reinterpretation for each new generation. 

And amidst uncertainty there’s always one thing we can be confident in communicating: what we want for the future. I’m hoping 2026 will be, if not a turning point, then at least an inflection point: a year for us to begin to turn away from the abyss of nationalism, xenophobia, climate denial, and eugenics, and toward a kinder and more peaceful future. I could argue either side of whether this will happen, but I know for sure that I hope it goes this way, and that I will try to help matters along myself as best I can. I hope you do too.

(This is December’s second free post; the month’s bonus post for subscribers will arrive in early January due to holiday delays. Thanks for reading, and happy new year.)