A long time ago I became fascinated by the obsession people have that the time they live in is of epic, overwhelming significance. I hunted around for a word that would sum this up. There isn’t one, so I invented my own: chronocentricity. It’s a form of egocentricity, a solipsistic fixation with the notion of one’s own implicit importance by living in a time of importance.

One of the curiosities of chronocentricity is that it is almost always predicated on the belief that the present is self-evidently of especial badness, replete with disasters and an imminent catastrophe of some sort, while what went before was much better.

The present is the worst of times, the past was th