Dear Reader,

It is late in the evening. I am sitting at my desk, working. I put on music on YouTube, as one does when silence grows too conspicuous. I begin to notice how eerily precise the algorithm is at reading my mood. After “Mission” by Rush and “Solsbury Hill” by Peter Gabriel, it proposes a live version of “Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush, recorded at the Manchester Apollo in 1979 (this version).

The title of the video catches my eye. 1979. I was just one year old.

And there it is — that familiar, slightly vertiginous feeling. The realisation that whilst I was still learning how to form syllables, a young woman from South-East London had already written and performed a piece of music that would echo across decades. Before I could speak, she had already said something extraordinary.

I sat with that thought for a moment. Perhaps you know the feeling: that strange compression of time when you suddenly grasp how much of the world’s beauty was already in motion before you even arrived. It is a humbling sensation, and my first instinct was to follow it towards a familiar conclusion — that the great works are behind us, that we are merely inheritors of a diminishing legacy.

Luckily, my rational side intervened.

Because here is the thing: even Kate Bush, with all her otherworldly genius, was brought into this world roughly two thousand years after Marcus Aurelius. And Marcus Aurelius himself was building on ideas that stretched back centuries before him. The emperor-philosopher knew something about the vertigo of time. In Meditations, he wrote:

Were you to live three thousand years, or even a countless multiple of that, keep in mind that no one ever loses a life other than the one they are living, and no one ever lives a life other than the one they are losing. The longest and the shortest life, then, amount to the same, for the present moment lasts the same for all and is all anyone possesses. No one can lose either the past or the future, for how can someone be deprived of what’s not theirs?

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (2.14)

There is a paradox buried in those lines. It speaks directly to my late-night revelation. We cannot lose the past because it was never ours to hold. We cannot lose the future because it has not yet been given to us. All we have — all we have ever had — is this present moment. And yet, this present moment is not the end of the story. It is, if anything, somewhere near the middle.

This is where a concept I have grown quite fond of comes into play: the Lindy Effect.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book Antifragile, describes it with characteristic precision:

If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. But, and that is the main difference, if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty years. This, simply, as a rule, tells you why things that have been around for a long time are not “ageing” like persons, but “ageing” in reverse. Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile

The Lindy Effect applies to non-perishable things — ideas, technologies, cultural practices, art. Unlike human bodies, which grow frailer with age, ideas that survive grow stronger. The longer they endure, the longer they can be expected to continue. Think of it as a kind of temporal Darwinism. What has lasted has proven its worth not through argument but through sheer persistence.

Now, let’s consider what that means.

Humanity has been producing art, philosophy, science, and music for thousands of years. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius have survived nearly two millennia. The plays of Sophocles, longer still. The principles of geometry, even longer. If the Lindy Effect holds — and there is compelling reason to believe it does — then the story of human achievement is not winding down. It is, at most, halfway through.

We are not standing at the summit, gazing down at a long descent. We are standing in the middle of the climb, with as much above us as below. Perhaps more.

This is not naive optimism. It is a mathematical heuristic applied to the trajectory of civilisation. The same reasoning that tells us a book in print for a century will likely survive another century tells us that the traditions of human creativity, after enduring for millennia, have millennia more ahead of them. The cathedrals of thought we have built are not ruins. They are foundations.

And if that is the case, if we are genuinely somewhere near the midpoint of what humanity can achieve, then a rather extraordinary question follows: what role might we play in the second half?

I confess I find this thought deeply energising. Not because it promises us personal glory, but because it reframes our position entirely. We are not latecomers to a party that peaked hours ago. We are participants in an ongoing composition — one that is still being written, still being performed, still finding new keys and unexpected harmonies. The algorithm on my screen may be eerily good at reading my mood, but it cannot predict what music has yet to be composed, what ideas have yet to be thought, or what connections have yet to be made.

As Carl Sagan once put it, “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”

Perhaps the most generous interpretation of that late-evening YouTube session is this: the algorithm showed me the past not to make me feel small, but to remind me of the scale of what is possible. Kate Bush wrote “Wuthering Heights” at the age of eighteen. Marcus Aurelius wrote his most intimate reflections whilst managing an empire and fighting wars on its borders. The thread that connects them is not talent alone — it is the insistence on contributing, on adding one more voice to a conversation that has been going on for millennia and, by all reasonable estimates, will continue for millennia more.

We are not at the end. We are right in the middle of everything. And that, I think, is a remarkably good place to be.

Until next time, keep your eyes on what has yet to come.