Every generation believes it is living in the most turbulent time in history. Turn on the news, scroll through social media, or simply listen to conversations around town, and you’ll hear the same sentiment repeated in a hundred different voices: “We’ve never seen things this bad.”

Anger. Fear. Division. The tone feels urgent. Existential. Final. As though civilization itself is always perched on a cliff and all we can do is hang on and panic together.

Not long ago, my wife said something quietly insightful, as she so often does. She mentioned that many of the issues stirring people up today are the very same issues her father raged about a half-century ago. Politics. Social change. Moral outrage. Uncertainty. The feeling that the world was tipping dangerously out of balance.

Di...

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