Nearly everyone has heard the ancient Chinese curse meant to hex foes: “May you live in interesting times.” It is notable for its irony; on the surface, “interesting times” sounds alluring and non-threatening. But what constitutes an age of historical interest is never a mundane era of calm. What makes history interesting is the wars, the plagues, the conquests and the chaos that rupture stability and leave scars for future generations. The saying emphasizes that nobody wants to live through these times, even if they enjoy reading about them.
It is also entirely apocryphal. “May you live in interesting times” is neither ancient nor Chinese nor a curse. Rather, it began circulating in British political circles at the turn of the 20th century before going mainstream in the Anglosphere. The insistence on an ancient Chinese origin is meant to convey a certain banality or cyclicity to the extraordinary modern epoch that succeeded the Middle Ages.
Since Columbus crashed the shores of Hispaniola in 1492 there has been an accelerated rate of change permeating every rung of global society from the royal palace to the peasant village to the hunting camp. Modernity has wiped clean nearly every mode of existence that had previously stood for millennia.
Writing near the time and place where the apocryphal Chinese curse first originated, Karl Marx linked modernity’s dizzying pace to the motion of a capitalist economy fed by surplus value:
Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.1
Following Marx’s summation, the curse of interesting times is synonymous with life under the capitalist mode of production. In the present age we have seen our lives revolutionized by smartphones and Ozempic and artificial intelligence and the infinite scroll of social media. Without any new land to discover or national markets to conquer, the economic forces devouring profit have blown open digital universes and pierced the sky with rockets. All this, and there are still those among us who remember a time before the “personal computer” and internet.
Marx correctly diagnosed technological revolution and cultural agitation as endemic to capitalism but he undoubtedly underestimated the market’s ability to distract humanity from our sober senses, our real conditions of life, our relationships with others.
Even with the power to connect billions into direct relations, social media is reduced to a horde of vanity projects. The planetary boundaries for pollution are broken in the heat of smouldering summers. Leading nations have become the geopolitical equivalent of mass shooters. The western economy lives on the edge of a stock market bubble inflating by the day. But should any of this concern you—there’s a pill for that. Interesting times indeed.
Rosa Luxemburg said: “The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.” Overcoming the curse of interesting times still depends on apprehending its root cause; the suicidal logic of capitalist growth and the corporate suppression of human vitality. The current state of class consciousness is strung-out but the potential to connect, to organize, to educate and to inspire has never been more latent.
Thanks for reading!
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. ↩︎