We’re living in a new age: the so called ‘Anthropocene’ age or “Human epoch“ as some call it. Defined as the point in time when “scientific thought became a geological force” the Anthropocene age truly is a ‘new age’ in all sense of the term. It’s an age never seen before in Earth’s history in that it’s the first age where one of Earth’s organisms has proliferated so much and become so influential that the survival of Earth itself has become dependent on it... that organism is of course human and the effect of our influence is called ‘climate change‘.
Despite it’s uniqueness and gravitas the Anthropocene is just one of many geological ‘new ages’ that Earth has experienced during it’s 4.5 billion year existence but not all ‘new ages’ are geological or environmental, many are astrological, social, generational or often cultural and despite their differences they all have two things in common: time & change. Each ‘new age’ is defined as a certain transitional moment and resulting period in history, be it on a huge scale like the unfathomably gargantuan movements of our universe or the tiny changes and periods within a single human life.
Irrespective of magnitude and duration ‘new ages’ have huge repercussions, positive and negative, for the people and populations who experience them;Imagine all the ‘new ages’ your grandmother has lived through and what affects they have had on her life and her understanding of personal self: the ‘new age’ of war, the ‘new age’ of spiritualism, the ‘new age’ of feminism, the ‘new age’ of the computer, the ‘new age’ of information and the ‘new age’ of old age... with each ‘new age’ she had to readjust and either jump on the bandwagon, push back at the threat of change or simply give in and let the wave of change take her by the hand.
This issue of Unstable Mag takes a look at the theme of ‘New Age’ in all its guises and asks the question, how many ‘New Age’ waves will you experience in your lifetime and will you surf them as well as Granny did?
