It’s a bit of a trope in this year of our Lord 2025 to say that we, whoever we are, are living in unprecedented times. Cultural, political, and social change ran amok between 2010 and 2025. The rise of Black Lives Matter, the transgender moment, Trumpism, COVID-19, and more have made the world very different from that of millennials, Generation X, or baby boomers.

The problem with the claim that we are living in “unprecedented” times is that each of those respective generations I just mentioned defined their own precedents. It’s better just to say things are different. I know different doesn’t sound quite as spicy, or as urgent, as unprecedented does, but it does have the virtue of being truer. And it has the truth of being a real part of a real history of a real people, rather than fever dreams of utopians always pining for a better world that is just beyond the horizon, if the old order could only be finally gotten rid of.

Recommended Stories

• There is no feminist solution to the fertility crisis
• RFK Jr. investigative agenda raises new ethical questions for autism advocates
• Do the Democrats need Barack Obama? It's complicated

Every single generation is convinced, it seems, that their revolution will work, and their moment is uniquely in need of revolution. This was the belief that drove the Southern states to secede from the Union in 1860 and 1861. In the summer of 1860, my great-great-grandfather, Robert Morisey, was born in eastern North Carolina on a sizable plantation. Infant Rob lived among people who believed that Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party represented an unprecedented threat to the slaveholding order. When Abraham Lincoln called up soldiers to prosecute the Civil War, baby Rob’s part of North Carolina answered the call enthusiastically.

For four years, he and his family lived on a war footing. And in the third week of March, something happened to Rob and his family that has no precedent for any American living in the United States since the 19th century: An actual army, bent on actual political conquest and the subjugation of Rob’s family, invaded. Some 60,000 Union soldiers came from the South, an army of blue-clad soldiers whose chief had a perhaps unearned but terrifying reputation. General William Tecumseh Sherman rolled through Sampson County and nearly obliterated the Confederate Army sent to stop him.

Baby Rob’s neighbors were there fighting. And they all were defeated. This wasn’t a defeat of a small colonial force or an American army doing a peacekeeping mission, or even nation-building. This was the type of defeat that the civilian population could feel and smell. In what turned out to be the last large-scale battle of the American Civil War, 4,200 men were injured or killed. One month later, Rob’s family was a conquered people.

The conquerors were not going to let the slaveholding aristocrats of the South ever rebel again, and to ensure the region was largely pacified, 10 of the 11 Confederate states were put under martial law and de facto military dictatorships. North Carolina and South Carolina were transformed overnight into the Second Military District, governed by one of the most morally loathsome Union generals, Daniel Sickles, most famous for murdering Francis Scott Key’s son in broad daylight and then being the first person to use the temporary insanity defense successfully. Ulysses S. Grant loathed Sickles, so the only way he retained any political patronage was by courting the most extreme Radical Republicans who wanted to revolutionize Southern society through congressional-led Reconstruction.

It was to that military district, not a state in the union, but a military government, that Kate Patterson was born in June 1867. She was not legally considered a U.S. citizen. A quarter-century went by. The U.S. reunited politically, and it was the Gilded Age era of American imperial and industrial strength. Sometime in the early 1890s, grown-up Rob met Kate Patterson, and in 1894, they married. They had children and lived as most people of that era did.

But like most Americans in that era, they lived in a world before the medical miracles we take for granted were readily accessible, even if they existed. Kate got sick and died, most likely from the viral or bacterial infections that stalked the South in the late 19th and early 20th Century. In 1878, for example, a yellow fever epidemic decimated New Orleans and Memphis. Five thousand people died in New Orleans, and 25,000 of the Memphis population of 45,000 people left the city. Death was still a constant, right up until the turn of the century.

Rob remarried after Kate’s death. His sons were just old enough to be drafted into what was the largest military conflict mankind had ever known: World War I. President Woodrow Wilson’s use of government to get America into the war and then sustain the war effort defies imagination. The Committee on Public Information and the 1917 Espionage Act created a network of thousands of de facto domestic spies. The War Industries Board assumed near-total control of the U.S. economy. The late Arthur A. Ekirch, a conservative intellectual and professor at Columbia University, argued that World War I saw near total unanimity in American society in support of the suppression of basic civil and religious liberties. And to top it all off, 117,000 Americans died in the 14 months of combat, which many Americans saw as completely unnecessary.

By contrast, the U.S. deaths in eight years of war in Iraq were 4,400, and 20 years of war in Afghanistan brought about 2,400 deaths. If the war deaths of what was then called the Great War were not enough, another enemy began quietly stalking the globe in 1917. A deadly strain of influenza hit Allied Armies, and the summer of 1918 arrived on the U.S.’s Atlantic Seaboard. By the fall, the Spanish Flu, as it came to be known, made its way to North Carolina. Rob Morisey, a hale 58-year-old father with a friendly smile and a full handlebar mustache, got sick. His 20-year-old daughter, Mattie, tended him and experienced the awful sight of watching her father die the excruciating death that comes from influenza.

Perhaps it’s the fact that I knew Mattie that makes this story all so real to me. She was a formal but friendly woman, nearly 90 years old by the time I knew her as my Nana. She died in 1993. I look at my own life — that of what comedian Iliza Shlesinger riffs on as the life of elder millennials — compared to Nana’s, and I see relative peace, prosperity, and communal health.

The decline in U.S. religiosity is over. The transgender moment, it seems, is over. The inflation rates of the Biden years, which got to 7%, never approached the nearly 15% the U.S. saw in 1980. Bowling Green State University noted that marriage rates, declining for 50 years, began to increase after 2022. Why then do baby boomers, Gen X, millennials, and Zoomers see each other as so different, and why do Zoomers think they’re living through unprecedented times?

King’s College London professor Bobby Duffy notes that young people aren’t unusual: “What’s really changed is the more fractious political and media context: The internet and social media have given us the tools to communicate our differences at scale.”

SOCIAL MEDIA IS CRIPPLING GEN Z

Which makes me wonder what Rob, Kate, and Mattie might have done had they had access to Facebook, Instagram, or X. I imagine that each of them might have felt they experienced something unprecedented. As for me, and for American Zoomers, we live in an era that is undeniably different from the ones that came before.

We’ve never been invaded by an actual army, and have never been drafted into an unpopular war. We’ve generally had access to healthcare. We’ve generally not experienced healthy adults die en masse from uncontrollable disease. For all these reasons, we might give the generations that preceded us a measure of respect. Our problems are different. But hardly “unprecedented.”

Miles Smith IV is an assistant professor of history at Hillsdale College.